“Meow, meow!” Roderick continued.
Mr. Poe’s expression changed to one of concern. “That’s very brave, but reckless. After all, my friend, if you use your ninth life right now to go back in the guise of your former self, well . . . you’ll lose all the kitten years of your final life, thereby shortening it. And, even worse, you’ll be delivering yourself into grave danger when you can least afford to do so.”
“Meow,” Roderick said.
“Yes, I agree it’s important. But what, exactly, can you do to help the twins?”
Roderick had no specific answer for this one. But it seemed logical to them both that his return, being wholly unexpected to Professor Perry, was bound to have some kind of positive effect.
That’s when the pounding on the bathroom door started. And the angry roar. A grizzly bear needed the toilet.
Always a bad idea to make grizzlies wait.
“Let’s go to my cubicle,” Mr. Poe suggested.
The grizzly stepped aside as they exited, but flashed Mr. Poe an impatient look.
“Don’t worry, I put the seat down,” Mr. Poe assured the bear.
Once at Mr. Poe’s cubicle, the two old friends picked up their conversation.
“Meow,” Roderick said.
“Yes, I know they’ve taught you new skills,” Mr. Poe acknowledged. “The rope stuff and the playing dead and all the vocal impressions—dogs, birds, crying babies. Excellent. But how can we put any of those things to use?”
The cat purred. Then he said, “Meow.”
Mr. Poe nodded. “I understand. You’re determined to go back. I guess I’d do the same if I could. Still, my friend, this means we have to say good-bye again.”
Roderick softly chirruped.
“You’re right. I’ll see you again, in time,” Mr. Poe acknowledged.
A familiar voice called from across the office. “Mr. Poe?” It was Emily Dickinson, who didn’t seem to mind the gamy smell of the animals and the generally disorderly atmosphere.
Mr. Poe spun his desk chair around.
No one wore a high-collared black cotton dress more attractively, he thought.
She stopped at the entrance to his cubicle. “Our greeting card warning?” she inquired. “Did it work?”
Mr. Poe shook his head. “It was too late, I’m afraid.”
Her face fell. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Emily. The card was brilliant.”
Miss Dickinson wrung her hands. “But the boys, what shall—”
“Don’t worry. Roderick’s got a plan.”
She turned to the black cat with the figure eight on his chest. “Roderick? Roderick Usher?” She realized what this meant. She sighed. “So, the professor managed to . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Meow,” answered Roderick.
Miss Dickinson didn’t understand.
“It was poison,” Mr. Poe translated.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Then she clenched her fists. “We have to help the boys. Somehow!”
“We will,” Mr. Poe assured her. “You see, my friend here is the bravest feline in this world or any other.”
NEVERMORE
“A tunnel?” Edgar proposed, glancing down, desperate to find any way out of the basement.
The floor was dirt.
Allan stomped his foot. “But it’s hard as rock.”
That’s when they heard a most unexpected sound just outside the heavy, locked wooden door that led to the steps upstairs.
A baby crying softly.
Edgar and Allan made their way to the heavy door, pressing their ears against it.
The sound of the baby’s cries turned to the chirping of a sparrow.
The twins looked at each other, confused.
Then the chirping was replaced by the sound of a monkey chattering.
Baby cries, sparrows, monkeys? These were vocal impersonations the twins had taught to—
There was a familiar meow.
The boys held their breaths. Was it the murdered Roderick’s ghost?
They glanced cautiously at the doorknob. They’d heard the professor turn the old-fashioned key to lock it.
Nonetheless, Allan tried the knob.
To their surprise, the door opened.
Sitting on one of the lower steps that led out of the basement was Roderick, the key in his mouth.
The twins were overjoyed. But confused. “Are you a ghost?” Edgar asked Roderick.
As if in answer, the cat leaped into his arms.
Ghosts may look like ordinary beings, but they don’t feel like warm flesh and blood.
“But we thought . . .” Allan started. He stopped. What was the use of telling Roderick about the terrible scare they’d had a few minutes before, the deep sense that they’d truly lost him forever?
Roderick purred. It was a beautiful sound.
Then, in the dim light, Edgar noticed something strange. He held Roderick away from him, observing the cat’s chest—there, in place of the familiar white figure eight, was a patch of white fur in the shape of a nine.
“Roderick,” Edgar asked, “is this really you?”
Roderick gave him a disgruntled look, as if to say, How dare you ask?
“But the nine?” Allan inquired.
Roderick meowed. However, what translated into English up in the Animal Languages Division did not do the same on Earth.
So the twins looked at each other, uncertain.
There was one way to confirm this was really their cat.
Allan said, “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche, how statue-like I see thee stand.” This quote, from one of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s works, served as one of two cues for the Stuffed Cat Trick, known only to Roderick and the twins.
In response, the black cat froze and his eyes went glassy, as if he were an inanimate work of feline taxidermy.
“It is you!” The boys rejoiced.
Roderick snapped back to life.
But the white, furry nine?
The twins looked at each other.
Maybe it was just a strange, feline reaction to the apparently nonfatal fugu fish that Roderick had eaten. Or might the numeral stand for something mystical, such as the transition from an eighth life into a ninth life?
Nah, the twins thought. That nine lives business was strictly an old wives’ tale.
Wasn’t it?
In any case, this was no time for contemplation.
“We’ve much to do,” Edgar said.
“Starting with finding Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith,” said his brother.
But Roderick seemed suddenly distracted, glancing around Edgar and into the basement. He began licking his chops and squirming in the boy’s arms.
Edgar and Allan turned.
The rats were regaining consciousness, and as they caught sight of Roderick, their tiny, luminous eyes widened. Squeaking, they began to pour out of the house through the rat holes and into the cold night.
Roderick tried to go after them.
Edgar held tight. “Hey, those guys saved our lives,” he said to Roderick.
Roderick gave them a confused look.
“Just trust me,” Edgar assured him as he started up the stairs after Allan.
At the top of the basement stairs, the boys opened the door very slowly.
All clear.
Edgar set Roderick on the thick carpet, and he and his brother tiptoed into the mansion behind their soft-footed cat. They knew that in the dining room their mortal enemies were now enjoying a meal in celebration of Edgar’s or Allan’s presumed gruesome death. Over soaring, throbbing operatic music, the twins could make out the sound of talking, though they couldn’t make out the words. Nonetheless, the tone was evident—it was ju
bilant, arrogant, barbarous.
Roderick started toward the grand staircase, which lay in the direction of the dining room.
The twins followed, trying to step as lightly as their cat.
At the foot of the staircase, they now could make out the words. They stopped to listen:
Miss Reynolds—or, rather, the actress Barbara Bainbridge—spoke in her naturally husky voice. “So, according to the latest update on my phone, NASA has confirmed that the satellite will destroy most of downtown Baltimore!”
The twins looked at each other, horrified. Baltimore?
Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison, Katie Justus, David Litke, Riley McHuff . . .
Mrs. Rosecrans and all the teachers!
And thousands of others!
“Ha!” Professor Perry laughed among his company of villains. “Considering that’s where those rocket scientists came from—well, isn’t it deliciously ironic? What a ripe turn of events!”
The others at the table laughed with him, their dinnerware rattling.
“Should be quite a boon to my business,” said a man whose voice the twins didn’t recognize.
“So true, Mr. Iger,” the professor responded. “With less than fifteen minutes until impact, Baltimore is pretty much doomed. Look at this video on my phone. Can you see it? Go ahead, pass it around. The streets and expressways are jammed. You’re going to run out of caskets, Mr. Iger,” he concluded brightly.
“Lucky for you, Professor, that I already brought the deluxe units for the boy and the cat,” Mr. Iger answered with a chuckle. “Or you might be paying premium prices!”
“And best of all is that with so many dead in Baltimore, no one will ever miss the Poe brats or their pathetic guardians,” said a man with a Chinese accent.
“So true, Dr. Psufo,” said the professor. “Who knew that crazy, careening satellite would make my life easier?”
“We’re lucky to be out here in the country,” Mr. Iger responded.
“Do you think we’ll hear the explosion and see the flash from all these miles away?” asked Barbara Bainbridge.
“Oh, yes,” the professor assured her. “It’ll be massive.”
“Hundreds or even thousands dead,” said another man, whose voice the twins recognized as that of Mr. Ian Archer. He was the professor’s right-hand man and was supposed to be imprisoned in Kansas. Doubtless, his boss had sprung him.
Roderick had heard enough. He started up the stairs.
The boys followed him, thinking it through: The Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite was just fourteen minutes from crashing into Baltimore. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportions. Frustratingly, the twins still hadn’t deduced the code needed to redirect the craft’s guidance system. Since there were a billion possibilities to any nine-digit code, even NASA had given up. Still, there had to be something the twins could do!
Meantime, Roderick had run to the end of the upstairs hallway, and was now sitting like an Egyptian sculpture before a closed door.
Edgar and Allan hurried toward him.
Along the way, they glanced through the open doorway of one of the other rooms. It appeared to be Professor Perry’s office, visible in the moonlight that streamed through a window near the desk. The only other light in the room was the glow of a computer screen.
The boys hesitated a moment, their shared minds racing.
Very softly, Roderick meowed to regain their attention.
The boys nodded and joined their cat at the far door. Inside, they found Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith bound and gagged. Though the pair could not move, their eyes expressed their relieved delight at the sight of Edgar and Allan. Edgar held a finger to his lips. Then Allan began very softly whistling “Ring Around the Rosy,” which was Roderick’s cue to begin untying the knotted ropes.
The cat leaped to the tied-up couple and began to work.
The twins raced back down the hall to Professor Perry’s office computer.
On the table beside the computer, they discovered a handwritten draft of a threatening letter to another scientist. There was no time to read it now, of course, but Allan folded the note and put it in his back pocket.
With the city of Baltimore at stake, the twins knew their aunt and uncle would certainly have no objections to their going online. They bent over the computer, their four hands typing at once, as coordinated as moving parts in a lightning-fast clock.
Hacking into the NASA site was a snap for Edgar and Allan.
And getting into the site for the Bradbury satellite was no more difficult.
But there they stopped.
ACCESS TO GUIDANCE SYSTEM
PASSWORD (NUMBERS ONLY):
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
The Poe twins looked at each other, stumped.
Less than twelve minutes before the destruction of their hometown.
And, almost equally frightening, they heard Professor Perry’s voice from downstairs. “And now it’s on to the dessert course—delicious sliced durian—one serving of which we will set aside to take down to the basement to share with the surviving Poe twin, our captive.” Then more laughter.
That’s when they heard a tap-tap-tapping at the window.
They turned just in time to catch a fluttering shadow outside—two stories up. And then nothing.
“What was that?” Edgar muttered.
Silence. They returned to the computer.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
This time, the boys turned and saw a large black bird on the windowsill outside.
A raven.
Allan heaved open the double-paned window and the raven flew inside without hesitation, fluttering about with a black gusto of wings until it came to rest atop the professor’s bookshelf, on the head of a sculpted bust of a Greek goddess.
Naturally, the twins thought of their great-great-great-great granduncle’s most famous poem, “The Raven.” And when the bird pronounced a word with all the clarity of a trained stage actor, the twins knew that this was no coincidence.
The raven said, “Nevermore.”
Just like in the poem.
“But what does that have to do with us?” Allan asked, looking at the bird.
“Nevermore,” responded the raven.
“Where have you come from?” Edgar asked. “Who sent you?”
“Nevermore.”
Does it matter where the bird comes from? the twins wondered.
Or who sent him?
And might there be sense to the word, after all?
“Nevermore!” the twins cried in unison.
The word contained nine letters. . . .
Mal and Irma were rocket scientists, but they were also Poes!
The boys turned back to the computer.
“On a telephone keypad, the word ‘nevermore’ would be typed as 638376673,” Edgar said.
They glanced at the clock at the bottom of the computer screen.
The satellite was due to demolish Baltimore in less than seven minutes.
“Type it in,” Allan said.
Edgar did so.
They held their breaths.
After a moment, a new screen appeared:
ACCESS GRANTED
The raven pushed off of the sculpted bust and disappeared out the open window.
The bust teetered and fell to the floor, breaking into thirds.
“If we employ the guidance system, we can still alter the satellite’s point of impact, saving Baltimore,” said Allan.
“But we can’t reverse its direction to send it into the Atlantic,” Edgar observed. “Its angle of momentum is already established.”
“So we have to pick a spot in the general Baltimore-DC area.”
“Right, but we can’t just pick any spot,” Edgar added. “We wouldn’t know what we’d be destroying.�
��
The boys looked at each other. This is the spot, they thought simultaneously.
The mansion.
By entering its geographical coordinates, they could at once save their city and, by directing the satellite’s crash, allow for their mother and father’s murderers to be avenged, setting Mal and Irma free to move on to wherever it was they truly belonged.
A simple mapping program identified the exact coordinates of the mansion.
The twins typed it into the satellite’s guidance system.
CONFIRMED:
COORDINATES CHANGED
A clock on the screen began counting down the time to impact: five minutes, twenty seconds.
“Now we’ve got to get out of here,” Edgar said.
“Roderick ought to be finished untying Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith,” Allan added.
They turned.
But the doorway was occupied by a familiar and unwelcome presence—the image of Edgar Allan Poe.
“My, aren’t you two slippery?” Professor Perry said. He had a gun trained on them. “I thought I heard something peculiar up here.” He stepped over the broken sculpture. “So I took it upon myself to check.”
The twins said nothing.
The professor took another step toward them. “I think you boys owe me an apology for making me rudely leave all my guests downstairs, to say nothing of my having to abandon the delicious dessert I was just beginning to enjoy.”
The twins stayed silent.
“Hey, what’s that countdown on the computer screen?” the professor asked.
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
A NOTE LEFT THAT NIGHT IN THE MAILBOX OF THE POE HOUSE IN BALTIMORE
Dear Edgar and Allan,
We were in the neighborhood with our parents and thought we’d take a chance and stop by to see if you and your aunt and uncle were home. Sorry to have missed you. Hope you’re all having fun, wherever you are. In any case, we’re back from our trip and look forward to catching up.
Warmest,
Milly
p.s. Have you guys seen that new code-breaking app for mobile devices? Fantastic!
TURN OVER
Oh, there she goes again—enough about apps and mobile devices . . . Better, poetry!
The Pet and the Pendulum Page 9