He shook his head. “Oh, it’ll work, so long as I write a full confession, signed Professor S. Pangborn Perry.”
“Yes, but then you’ll go to prison.”
The professor motioned to his face. “How will the authorities recognize me, geniuses?”
“But—” the boys started.
Perry held up one finger, as if anticipating their objection. “Recall, boys, that back in New Orleans you two didn’t punish the murderous pirate. He was already long dead. You just brought his name to public disgrace, which proved enough to set your ghostly friends free. Thus, my signed confession will set the murdered one of you free. And then I’ll simply adopt a new name to go with my new face.”
Could he be right?
Gleefully, Professor Perry slapped his hand down on one of the tables. “Ha!” he laughed. “If you really want to talk about unsolved homicides whose victims are trapped where they were killed, well, we could talk about your mother and father, who are orbiting the Earth even as we speak, soon to crash at some random spot in a final, obliterating fireball.”
“They died in an accident,” Allan said.
“Oh, did they?” Professor Perry asked pointedly. He grinned. “Mal and Irma Poe didn’t like my private scientific observations of their remarkable twin boys. Of course, I never told them my full plan. But, still, they took a dislike to me and demanded I stay away. So I drugged them, just as I drugged you, right before they went up for final adjustments to the satellite. And three, two, one, whoosh! Gone.”
“You murdered them!” the boys shouted, straining uselessly at the ropes.
“That’s such a harsh word,” Professor Perry answered. “I prefer the word ‘eliminated.’ But if ‘murder’ is what you want to call it, who am I to object?”
The harmonious handbell rang upstairs.
“Ah, that means the main course is being served,” Professor Perry said. “So, I’m afraid I have to leave you boys for a little while. But perhaps I’ll bring back dessert—for one of you, at least.”
He pointed a small remote control toward the top of the deadly pendulum, which responded by beginning to swing in gradually widening arcs. The boys watched the glimmering blade swooping back and forth above them.
“You know how it works from my . . .” The professor laughed. “I mean, your ancestor’s story. The blade will gradually descend, giving you time to consider your terrible fate. The only difference is that, at the last moment, the arm of this device will slip randomly into one of two brackets so as to slice only one of you in half. After all, it wouldn’t do for me to come back from dinner to find the two of you in four parts. I only want three.”
“What have you done with our aunt and uncle?” Allan demanded, unable to take his eyes from the swinging blade.
“And Roderick!” Edgar added.
“Your aunt and uncle are a little tied up right now,” he answered with a laugh. “I’ll deal with them later. But your cat . . . Well, that creature has caused me much trouble in the past. I couldn’t allow that to happen again. So he’s gone.”
“Gone?” the twins asked, full of trepidation.
The professor laughed again. “Your cat’s tuna sashimi was not spiked with a knockout drug like the other appetizers, but was infused with deadly toxin from the fugu fish. Does that make me a murderer? Or just bad around cats?”
“You’re lying!” the boys cried.
“No.” The professor smirked. “I’m not.”
The boys believed him, though they didn’t want to.
Stunned, they couldn’t speak.
“Poison seemed the best choice,” the professor continued. “Oh, sure, there are bloodier, more satisfying ways of taking revenge on an enemy, be it a human or feline. But I can’t stand the sound of caterwauling or screaming. Call me a softie. Which explains why I’ve arranged for your imminent, bloody encounter with the razor-sharp pendulum to occur while I’m upstairs, dining peaceably. I mean, who likes the sound of a child’s screams? After all, I’m not some kind of maniac. Well, then again . . .” He grinned as he removed from his pocket a large, old-fashioned key.
The twins still had only one terrible thought: Roderick dead . . .
Professor Perry exited, closing and locking the heavy wooden door behind him.
The foot-long blade at the end of the pendulum kept swooshing back and forth, gradually descending.
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
Menu for Professor Perry’s
Celebratory Dinner Party
International Flavors!
Appetizers
WASP CRACKERS: Japanese wasps, boiled, dried, and infused into wafers
CASU MARZU: A Sardinian sheep milk cheese, uniquely flavored by live insect larvae
NATTO: Fermented soybean jelly
FRIED TARANTULA: Imported live from Cambodia, prepared here
Soup
STINK HEADS SOUP: Rotting Alaskan salmon heads in a savory broth
Entrées
SMALAHOVE: Norwegian smoked sheep’s head
HÁKARL: An Icelandic preparation of fermented basking shark
BLOOD SAUSAGE
STEAMED BROCCOLI AND CARROTS
Desserts
DURIAN: This fragrant fruit is banned in many public places for its distinctive scent
SUN-DRIED TOMATO SORBET WITH BALSAMIC VINEGAR
Beverages
MEKONG RIVER EEL WINE
COFFEE OR TEA
RATS!
EDGAR and Allan could barely muster the energy to attempt an escape. Not with Roderick gone. They missed him already. Who wouldn’t? He was the smartest cat in the world, though they’d have loved him even if he had been average in every way. And they blamed themselves. How could they have led poor Roderick into the professor’s trap? Tears streamed down the sides of their faces until they hadn’t any tears left.
Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith were captive upstairs, awaiting the professor’s mortal wrath. . . .
And now the twins knew that their parents, too, had been murdered. Mal and Irma Poe had been ghosts all these years, trapped in their orbiting satellite tomb, which was soon to crash, possibly killing many more.
Lesser boys might not have been able to carry on. But Edgar and Allan were not going to be part of the professor’s plan, no matter how much he had schemed. Their beloved aunt and uncle were not going to die. And, most of all, Professor Perry was not going to be allowed to get away with any of it—especially since bringing him to justice would set Mal and Irma Poe free to move on from this world, and so too Roderick, if the ghost business worked the same with animals.
Rage inspired the twins now.
Still, the razor-sharp pendulum swung above them. And it had already lowered a foot and a half. Any minute, it would begin to slice one of the boys into two bloody pieces.
Untying the ropes would have been easy for Roderick.
Edgar and Allan had to come up with something.
“OK,” Allan said, taking a deep, sobering breath as the blade swung overhead. “Let’s think about the actual story that our great-great-great-great granduncle wrote.”
In “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the main character escapes the descending blade that swings over his heart by rubbing oily food on the ropes that bind him, thereby drawing the rats who share the dark pit. It is no picnic to have ravenous rodents crawl all over his body, but the animals’ enthusiastic gnawing ultimately sets him free.
“There are rats here,” Edgar observed.
“And we have chocolates,” Allan said. “Albeit drugged chocolates.”
The boys could move their hands just enough to reach into their pockets for the truffles they’d taken earlier.
“Let’s hope there are enough sweet-toothed rats in here to get the job done before the last of them passes out,” Edgar
said.
Twisting and straining their wrists, the twins rubbed the half-melted chocolates on the ropes. Soon, the rats began to creep out of the basement shadows, cautiously interested. Edgar and Allan lay still, not wanting to spook them. Unfortunately, the swinging pendulum kept the rodents at bay for a while.
“We don’t have much time!” Allan whispered.
At last, one brave rat scurried up a table leg. He scampered over Edgar’s chest, his tiny, clawed feet like so many pinpricks. Edgar struggled to remain still. It wasn’t easy to let a rat scrabble over him. And it only got harder when the other rats, encouraged by their leader’s success, joined the party. Soon, both boys were literally crawling with rats.
“Ugh!” Edgar whispered.
Then more rats.
Finally, both boys had to bite down on their tongues to keep from screaming.
Meantime, the rats kept gnawing on the chocolate-flavored sections of the ropes—as well as the twins’ chocolaty pockets, which was even worse. Nonetheless, it seemed to be working!
Sections of the ropes were beginning to fray.
Then one of the rats passed out cold.
Then another rat and another fell off the boys’ chests and onto the ground. The latecomers kept gnawing, even as their compatriots kept passing out beside them. But how long could these last rats keep at it, however delicious the chocolate-flavored ropes?
Rats are much smaller than boys, so the knockout drug acted fast.
And the pendulum was so close now that the twins could feel the breeze each time it passed.
The last pair of rats slid off the boys’ chests, unconscious.
The ropes still held.
Edgar moved his right wrist. “There are only a few strands left!” he said to Allan. Both boys worked their hands and arms, their sweating faces fanned by the swinging scythe.
And then—snap!—the chewed ropes fell off the table.
The twins contorted themselves to unknot the rest of the ropes as the pendulum descended ever lower. They ducked and dodged the blade.
Finally, all the knots were undone—and Edgar and Allan were free!
They rolled off the wooden tables, careful not to step on any of the dazed rodents who had freed them. Seconds later, the pendulum slipped into a bracket and the curved blade descended with sudden, terrible violence on the left table, slicing a straight, shallow line in the wood exactly where one of the boys had lain just seconds before.
Edgar and Allan looked at each other.
They were glad to be alive. But Roderick . . .
They hadn’t time to mourn. That would come later. There were still too many immediate problems to solve.
For example: how to get out of this locked basement?
The window was fifteen feet above them—too high to reach, even if they made a pile of scattered junk and climbed up. Besides, there were steel bars on the window.
Still, there had to be a way out.
Skirting the battalion of still-unconscious rats, Edgar and Allan tried knocking on all the walls, looking for a hollow spot. If they found one, they could take the deadly pendulum apart and use the blade to slice through the drywall into whatever other underground room might lie adjacent—ideally, a chamber that offered some means of escape.
Not a bad plan.
However, all that their knocking revealed was that the basement was as solid as if it had been carved out of rock.
The twins looked at each other. There was too much at stake to fail.
But how to get out?
Edgar and Allan reasoned: Since the rats had gotten into the basement, then it couldn’t be truly sealed. And by the dim moonlight that illuminated the room, the twins indeed found a few openings near the base of the walls. However, these allowed for nothing larger than a rat.
“We can figure out a way to take down the pendulum and use it as a weapon for when the professor comes back,” Allan suggested.
“A kind of spear?” Edgar added hopefully. “Or long battle-ax!”
Allan nodded.
But after a moment, both boys realized it was a doomed plan. Professor Perry likely carried a pistol, which he’d use the moment he saw the dismantled pendulum turned on him.
Edgar brightened. “OK, so what if we remove the blade and rig a trap so it drops on the professor just as he opens the door, slicing him in half as he hoped to slice one of us?”
“That’s good, but how do we rig it?” Allan asked.
The ceiling was too high to reach.
“Then how about if one of us throws the blade at him? I mean, look at it. It’s shaped like a boomerang, which for millennia has been an effective hunting tool for Australian Aborigines.”
“Yeah, but if we miss? With a razor-sharp boomerang?”
“Oh, right.”
Since the boys had just avoided getting themselves sliced in half, this was not a good idea.
So, what now?
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
ON THE PROFESSOR’S MP3 PLAYER
< PLAYLISTS
TONIGHT’S AFTER-DINNER MUSIC:
MY FAVORITE MOMENTS IN OPERA
The death of Butterfly
Madama Butterfly, Puccini
The death of Mimì
La Bohème, Puccini
The death of Tosca
Tosca, Puccini
The death of Rodrigo
Don Carlo, Verdi
“When I Am Laid in Earth”
Dido and Aeneas, Purcell
The mad scene
Lucia di Lammermoor, Donizetti
Mr. Poe in the Great Beyond
Mr. Poe stood alone in the tiny break room of the Animal Languages Division. In one hand, he held a porcelain cup containing coffee that had long before cooled to room temperature. In the other hand, he held a copy of the brilliant greeting card that Emily Dickinson had managed to smuggle down to the Poe twins—just moments too late to save them. Mr. Poe’s expression was sad and faraway.
He’d left his desk and come here immediately after Edgar and Allan lost consciousness at the hors d’oeuvres table in the mansion down on Earth. He couldn’t watch the horrors he suspected were bound to follow.
During his lifetime, Mr. Poe had written about many grisly deaths. But that didn’t mean he ever got used to them happening in real life.
Especially to those he loved.
An announcement over the office PA system snapped him out of his dark reverie. “Mr. Poe to the reception area. Mr. Poe to reception.”
He sighed.
The last thing he wanted to do was to show another newly arrived animal—an ostrich or gnu or sloth or boa constrictor—around the place, pointing out the supplies closet and the water cooler and the copy machine, and finally concluding the tour at the animal’s new cubicle. But since Mr. Poe had recently refused to waste any more time attempting to make coherent speech out of animal grunts and groans, this task of showing newcomers around had become his responsibility—Mr. Shakespeare’s idea, of course.
He poured the cold coffee down the drain without ever having taken a sip of it, sighed, and started for the reception area.
There, he was met by a surprise that both overjoyed him and broke his heart.
It was no ordinary new arrival.
“My old friend!” he said to the black cat with the figure-eight marking on his chest.
The cat leaped into Mr. Poe’s arms.
It was good to hold his one-time pet, who purred affectionately. Mr. Poe rested his cheek softly against the top of the cat’s head. This was just what he needed to pull him from his despair. But he also knew how painful it had to be for his nephews, who had lost their friend—and to make matters worse, might not know that all animals go straight to the next world, regardless of the way they
die.
He sighed again as Roderick purred.
Then he held the cat at arm’s length to get a better look at him.
For a dead cat, he was in great shape.
In Mr. Poe’s lifetime, the two had been more than just master and pet. They’d been great friends. In those days, the cat had been a tortoiseshell and bore a black number six where he now bore a white figure eight. The years spent in Baltimore with Mr. Poe had constituted the sixth of nine lives.
Roderick’s seventh life had been spent among artists and writers on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s. That time, he’d been a gray tabby and bore a number seven.
His eighth he’d spent happily with Edgar and Allan.
Now he had only one life left.
The vast majority of old wives’ tales are pure fabrication, but the one about cats having nine lives is actually true. Most cats space out those nine lives, sometimes waiting centuries before returning to be reborn on Earth.
But Roderick wasn’t most cats.
Mr. Poe carried him into the restroom for privacy, locking the door behind them. He didn’t want their reunion interrupted by inquisitive elephants or nosy crocodiles. “The twins?” he asked.
“Meow,” Roderick answered.
“Still alive!” Mr. Poe cried in delight and surprise.
Just as surprising was that Mr. Poe understood the meow as if it had been English. It didn’t work that way with any of the other animals here. And it went far beyond the way many pet lovers understand their pets on Earth. Perhaps it was a combination of familiarity and being in the Animal Languages Division? No matter. Mr. Poe wasn’t going to waste time trying to figure it out—not with the twins’ lives in the balance.
The Pet and the Pendulum Page 8