But the pig didn’t stop. Instead it trotted past Sebastian to the other side of the room and then placed the brush on the floor. Sebastian sighed and walked over to pick it up. Just as the pig grabbed it in its mouth again and trotted away. “Oh,” said Sebastian, not remotely amused, “you’re playing keep-away. Not cool, pig.”
Sure enough, as Sebastian walked over again to grab the brush, the pig darted past him. And again. And again. In short order Sebastian was chasing the pig around the room and was pretty certain anyone watching would have found the situation the height of absurdity. Finally he had the pig cornered and lunged at it. The pig rushed at Sebastian, aiming to run between his legs but instead tripping him up, causing him to fall hard on his back. The pig slid across the floor and rammed into an old wooden filing cabinet, causing its hat to topple off its head and sending a mountain of papers flying off the top of the cabinet and down behind it.
Sebastian watched all this happen from his upside-down perspective and sighed. “Thanks for that, pig,” he said, pushing himself upright and rubbing the back of his head.
He stood up and brushed the dust off his trousers, then went over to the cabinet. He looked down at the pig, who looked up at him complacently. He picked up the hat and placed it back on its head. Then he turned and faced the filing cabinet. Sebastian put his hands on his hips and appraised it for a moment. And then he rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the cabinet with both hands, and pulled.
And pulled.
And pulled.
The pig snorted.
Finally the cabinet started to slide out from against the wall and Sebastian got down on his knees to grab at the fallen folders behind it.
He was hardly shocked to discover that behind it there were dust bunnies so huge one could have possibly called them dust hippos. But what did surprise him was that on the reverse of the very dull, nondescript filing cabinet was a door.
It was small, no higher than his knee. And it looked very much like a front door to a house. Quite fancy, really. So what could Sebastian do but open it?
Now, reader, there are generally surprises on the other sides of mysterious doors found hidden in cavelike archives—secret passageways, portals to other worlds, forgotten rooms—but what Sebastian found was far more exciting. You see, Sebastian found a box.
A very plain, and very wooden, and very average-sized box.
I know. Exciting, right?
Sebastian removed the box and looked at it. It was simple—an average, everyday wooden box—and it bore one marking. A strange, shallow carving on its top. It looked like this:
“This could be inappropriate,” Sebastian said to the pig. The pig sniffed the box and snorted. Sebastian took that as a positive sign and smiled. He had a good feeling that he could finally be completing his illicit assignment.
It was the end of his shift by this point, so Sebastian sneaked the box upstairs and slipped it quickly into his knapsack. He walked apace, not able to make eye contact with anyone and only nodding in return to the goodbyes the few members made as he returned to the first floor. Then he darted out the main door and practically ran home.
What a weight off his shoulders it was, knowing he had finally done what Myrtle had asked him to do. What a weight on his shoulders it was, carrying the darn box home.
Sebastian kept his pace up straight through his own front door. He pulled it closed behind him, zipped through the hallway, and rushed up the stairs past his mother, who shook her head, and he threw open his bedroom door and locked it behind him. It was the first time in his life that he had used the lock on his door, and if he hadn’t been so excited about the box, he might have thought about what it meant that he wanted to prevent his parents from coming in and seeing what he was up to. Instead of thinking that, however, he swept aside all his maps strewn about on the floor from yesterday, when he’d been comparing the lengths of rivers, and pulled the box from his knapsack.
Sebastian placed the box in the middle of the floor and sat cross-legged in front of it. And stared at it. Aside from the strange symbol on the top, there were no other markings, as far as he could see. There was no clasp or lock either, but there must be a way in. He just needed to figure it out.
He picked up the box and had a very close look at it. He noticed that the front and back sides appeared to be made of three panels: two large ones and one narrow one in the middle. He pushed into the narrow middle panel. Nothing happened. Then he tried to slide it toward the front. And it moved. But only maybe a quarter of an inch.
He did the same action on the other side and wondered what exactly was the advantage to a box opening only a quarter of an inch like that. As he turned the box over in his hands, the square panel on the far end of the box slid downward. A quarter of an inch. But now this quarter of an inch was becoming meaningful.
Following the pattern, Sebastian attempted to move the long top piece with the symbol on it, and sure enough, with the square side now a half-inch lower, the top of the box could be slid open…a quarter of an inch.
The pride he felt in having made this accomplishment was quickly replaced with frustration when he couldn’t figure out exactly how to get any further. He tried closing all the sides up again and starting from scratch. Still the box only opened a quarter of an inch. His temperature was rising; his cheeks were flushed with anger. There had to be a reasonable solution. He stared up close at the box, and as he slid each panel carefully back into place, he tried to sneak a peek to see how the darn thing worked. But the box wasn’t giving up its secrets.
“Sebastian!” his mother yelled from downstairs. “Dinnertime!” He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, put the box on his bed, and left his room to join his parents.
He sat down hoping dinner would pass relatively quickly. He wasn’t feeling particularly hungry, and he pushed his food around his plate aimlessly.
“I don’t understand,” said his mother with a worried expression on her face, “I thought brussels sprouts were your favorite.”
Shoot. He didn’t want them to get suspicious that something was wrong. “Oh, they are. They are,” he said quickly, and shoveled some into his mouth. He tried to chew and smile at the same time, which just made his mother’s eyebrows furrow more. But she didn’t say anything else.
Finally, after another agonizing fifteen minutes, he was allowed to leave the table. He went straight back up to his room and picked up the box, feeling pretty sorry for himself.
He absently started pushing the sliding pieces of the box in and out again, in and out. What was the solution? Was he not smart enough to solve it? In and out. In and out. That was a scary thought, though he supposed there was always something more to learn. Even for him.
In and out.
And suddenly the other square side panel moved. Sebastian froze, frightened that the slightest motion might undo his accident. For the first time since Myrtle’s assignment he understood the value of not doing something by the book. He realized he had mistakenly slid the narrow side pieces back to their original positions first, not last, when he had been reversing all the sliding pieces. This accident had resulted in the new square panel moving. Then he tried sliding the narrow pieces out again, and they moved even farther! A whole half inch! Then! Then the original square piece moved a half inch and then the top piece…slid off completely.
Sebastian hadn’t expected anything to slide off, so when it did, it practically flew across the room. He stared into the box at the contents. It was full of carefully placed old photographs and newspaper articles. Delicately, Sebastian pulled each piece out and examined it.
There was a large black-and-white photograph of five people sitting in front of a giant map. A very familiar giant map. Oh! Sebastian knew exactly what map it was. It was the map on the wall in the giant map room at the society headquarters! He examined the image more closely, going down the line of people. They all looked very serious, and a little smug. No, not smug, just…proud.
Sebastian pull
ed out a newspaper article. An attractive woman with a short bob, wearing a very crisp-looking khaki jacket and trousers, was smiling at the camera with her arm carefully draped over the body of a large, squat, furry creature that seemed part tiger, part bear. It was looking at her fondly. The caption read “The Filipendulous Five Discover the Banded Bearcat.”
Another article and another picture. A somber-looking man, head shaved, arms folded across his chest standing knee-deep in a jungle river. “Benedict Barnes, now of the Filipendulous Five, began his career as a cartographer but discovered a passion for photography after capturing the moment Joyce Styles became the first person to scale Mount Impossible by arriving ahead of her to set up the camera.”
And yet another. A man with dark hair and a trimmed beard, wearing sunglasses and a three-piece suit. He was pointing into the distance. “Alistair Drake Chooses the Correct Path.”
And still more articles and pictures. Some official-looking, some candid. Laughter at a birthday party. The clinking of glasses at a fancy dinner. But the best pictures weren’t of people at all. The best pictures were of castles on top of mountains, and rushing rivers over waterfalls, cities with towers reflecting a blinding sun, remote cottages dwarfed by redwoods. There was a tightrope across a gorge, a statue of a man with a bird head as tall as a skyscraper. There were animals and vistas and people. Lots of people of different sizes, shapes, and colors.
Cars, and trains, and planes, and a hot-air balloon.
And a submarine. At least, that was what it looked like to Sebastian. Its top poked out of the water, gleaming wet. Where had it been? Where was it going?
Whoever the Filipendulous Five were, they led one heck of an impressive life. They also seemed to be rather fond of each other, and Sebastian felt twinges of both excitement and jealousy as he read of their exploits and examined each photograph carefully. What an amazing group of people.
He glanced over at the lid of the box across the room and stared at it for a good long while. Then he looked back at the pictures of all the places and people and things….
Explorers.
They were quite obviously a group of explorers. It made perfect sense. Such a box was what you’d expect to find in a headquarters for explorers. It was hardly out of place. So why exactly had the box been stowed out of the way in the archives like that? Surely it belonged on a shelf like any of the other historical documents kept there, and not hidden away, stashed behind some secret door. And why had he never heard their names before? Or at least the name of their team? Why did none of these pictures grace the walls of the society like the many others of their fellow members?
Sebastian picked up the large group photo and stared at it. Such confident, assured faces. Who exactly were the Filipendulous Five? And what did they have to hide?
Aside from plain wooden boxes, of course.
Awkward dinner parties were Evie’s least favorite kind of parties. They came in well below themed parties, and absolutely below political parties. They made her retinas ache from that special blend of discomfort and boredom. Unfortunately, though they were her least favorite kind, Evie had been to many of these parties. In fact, she could safely say that she had attended far more awkward dinner parties than any other kind of party in her short life. Far more than birthday parties, that was certain.
Now that she thought about it, maybe she hated birthday parties more. No one ever invited her to those, so she could really only count the eleven she had had for herself. And then there was the part about how her parents, the people responsible for bringing her into the world and creating that day for her, had left it two years ago. Yes, possibly birthday parties were worse than awkward dinner parties. But not by much.
In Evie’s world, awkward dinner parties always happened at the same place. At the same time. With the same people. They happened once a week, and had been happening that way ever since she had been brought to the Wayward School. For some reason, two weeks into her new life as a person with no connections, no family, no anything, the Andersons had taken a kind of pity on her and had invited her to dinner at their modest but comfortable home just up the street. It had been an awfully sweet gesture, and Evie did appreciate their generosity. But…they were a really boring couple. Not particularly good at small talk, and only capable of asking Evie what was new in school that particular week. Though they did seem sincerely interested in her answers.
She’d now been attending their weekly dinners for almost two years. And they never got any less awkward. They always happened the same way, with the same kind of food. How many times had she sat staring at the inoffensive beige main course and then at the inoffensive beige dessert that replaced it? Evie never really knew what to say to the Andersons, who were very beige in their own way. Both were pale and lanky, with ash-blond hair cut short in the same efficient style. Their clothes were usually loose-fitting argyle sweaters and khaki slacks. She didn’t ask them questions, because she’d found out quickly that they didn’t like talking about themselves. Even when she’d asked why they liked the bland kind of food they did, Mrs. Anderson had just replied, “Oh, we’ve had enough excitement to last a lifetime.”
What that excitement might have been, neither Mrs. nor Mr. Anderson ever expanded on. So theirs was always a conversation of fits and starts, and one where the loud grandfather clock out in the hall seemed to have the most to say.
But nothing could have prepared Evie for the awkwardness of this present Anderson dinner party. For while it was one thing to sit staring at beige food, listening to the archaic ticking of the clock in the hall and waiting for dinner to finish, it was quite another to sit staring at a large old-fashioned-looking gun and two daggers on the plate across from her. It was also quite another to stare at the large man dressed in a black leather jacket and reflective aviator sunglasses sitting directly opposite.
But even more awkward than all that was the fact that Evie could make no attempt at small talk with the man, for it did appear that his jaw was wired shut. It was quite possibly the most disturbing thing she had ever seen. It clearly hadn’t been a quality surgeon who’d done the job. Bits of rusty metal wire poked through from between his lips, and one sharp piece protruded right through the flesh of his cheek. And when the man grimaced, which he had done only once when he’d first seen Evie, he revealed a mess of rusty wires crisscrossing his top and bottom teeth, connecting them to each other, making it impossible for him to open his mouth. And it was very difficult for her not to stare, even though she knew it was a terribly rude thing to do.
The Andersons sat at either end of the table, as they always did, and Evie observed that their eating had taken on a slower pace than usual and that their hands shook more than was typical. She didn’t blame them. Her own heart was pumping fast and she had no appetite whatsoever. Probably a good thing, really. She had the distinct impression, though the man hadn’t said a word (how could he have?), that something bad was going to happen once dinner was over.
The man had appeared at the door during the cocktail hour. The Andersons always hosted a cocktail hour before dinner. To prolong the dullness of the evening, Evie supposed. Though she did like the sparkling apple cider she was always given. The bell had rung and Mrs. Anderson had gone off to answer the door. Evie and Mr. Anderson were left to stare at each other mildly, only to be interrupted by the sound of a glass shattering against the marble tile of the hallway floor.
For the first time since she’d known them, Evie saw real emotion cross Mr. Anderson’s face, and he was up out of his seat and at his wife’s side so quickly that Evie hadn’t had a moment to process the action. She sat alone in the living room, wondering whether she should get up and join them at the door.
A few seconds later both the Andersons were escorted by the man back into the living room and over to the couch. Evie heard Mr. Anderson say, “It’s not here.” There was a quaver to his voice as he said it, and it had frightened Evie to hear him so scared. It was when the Andersons and the man had wal
ked past Evie that she had noticed the large old-fashioned-looking gun pressed into the small of Mrs. Anderson’s back, and the firm grip the man had on Mrs. Anderson’s wrist. Evie stared in shock, and in that shock found that she couldn’t do anything but…sit there.
Soon all four of them were sitting in total silence until the cocktail hour passed, and then, acting as if there was nothing amiss, they moved to the dining room table. This was when the man placed his gun on the extra place setting and removed two daggers from somewhere around his middle, in order, Evie assumed, to make it more comfortable for him to sit.
Dessert happened. And Evie glanced up at Mrs. Anderson, who placed a bowl of banana pudding in front of her and then sat down and stared at her own with a look of intense concentration. Her breathing was shallow but measured. Evie could hear it even from where she sat. She looked over at Mr. Anderson, who was staring at his wife with an expression of deep remorse. He was so tense, his neck muscles twitched.
What on earth was going on?
Having been too scared to speak up since it had all begun, Evie suddenly felt very protective of the Andersons. Sure, they were as dull as dishwater, or possibly even duller—dishwater at least had some bubbles to play with—but they had been kind to her for really no reason, and did give her a nice escape from the monotony that was the Wayward School. She liked them and she didn’t like to see them scared like this, so Evie decided she had to say something to the man, no matter how frightened she felt.
“Uh…see here…sir…I don’t…”
“Promise you won’t hurt the girl,” said Mrs. Anderson at the same time, and Evie stopped short.
The man gave Mrs. Anderson a look.
“She’s an orphan. She goes to the state school down the street. Every year we find a child to support who needs it. She isn’t…important.”
Despite the unfortunate circumstances, for the first time Evie had a better understanding of her situation with the Andersons and was, frankly, offended. Her cheeks burned and she looked down at her pudding bowl. It kind of sucked to be reminded how little she mattered to anyone in the world. She knew deep down there were greater issues at stake at the moment, but she couldn’t help her feelings. Feelings just feel. It’s what they do.
The Door in the Alley Page 5