Big Change for Stuart

by Lissa Evans

It was all flash and dazzle – a million facets catching the light, a blue blaze of sapphires, pearls like creamy gobstoppers, amethysts like blobs of blackcurrant jam, tigers’ eyes, opals and rubies, emeralds the moist green of new leaves, diamonds like chips of shattered ice, and everywhere the warm gleam of gold, the cold glitter of silver.

  A treasury.

  A treasury that looked as if someone had turned the room upside down and given it a good shake, or else taken the roof off and stirred it with a giant stick.

  ‘What a mess,’ said April, out loud. ‘What a complete and utter mess.’

  She climbed over the parapet into the room. Priceless necklaces and rings with stones the size of grapes lay in tangled piles across the floor, rows of shelves around the walls bore stacks of random jewellery, and in the centre of the room, a tall gold candleholder in the shape of the sun was festooned with crowns and bracelets, as if it were a hat-stand. There were open chests crammed with treasure, chairs draped with it, a cabinet whose every drawer was stuffed with objects. There was even a small table off to one side where somebody had left a half-eaten slice of bread and cheese balanced on top of an absolute pillar of crowns, stacked up like a kid’s building game. The cheese was the sort that her father adored – crumbly, streaked with blue mould and hideously smelly. And someone – probably the same person – had drunk some red wine as well, leaving the empty goblet on its side beneath the table.

  The only object that wasn’t completely covered with priceless items was a small footstool, standing on its own in one corner.

  Something about it made April feel weirdly uncomfortable. She stared at it, fishing around in her memory, and realized after a moment or two that it reminded her of the Thoughtful Stool that April (or May, or June – but usually April) had had to sit on as a small child when she’d been naughty. Stay there for five minutes and have a good think about what you need to change about your behaviour, her mum had always said. Ever since, April had preferred to do her thinking at speed, and standing up.

  She did it now, closing her eyes tightly, and – as usual – the solution popped almost instantly into her brain.

  ‘The picture,’ she said, with absolute certainty. ‘I have to find the objects that are in the picture, and put them on. A crown with emeralds, a cloak with fur, a diamond ring, a gold sceptre, a ruby orb.’

  Quickly she started to scan the room, and saw a diamond ring poking out of the coils of a pearl necklace on the floor nearby. She bent down to disentangle it, and then did a sort of screaming hop as a mouse shot out from underneath and zigzagged towards a corner of the room.

  From the door in the wall came an answering yap, and the dog stuck its nose over the parapet.

  ‘Thanks,’ said April, scooping it up and setting it down in the treasury. ‘Just keep the mouse away, would you? Not that I’m afraid of mice, of course – I just wasn’t expecting it.’

  Cautiously she had another go at untangling the ring, and realized that the pearl necklace was also wrapped around a crown – a crown with green stones.

  ‘Two down,’ she said, hooking the heavy crown over one arm and looking around for the next object, ‘three to go. Easy peasy.’

  It was at the exact moment she said the word peasy that she noticed another crown with green stones lying on the floor next to the candleholder. It looked exactly the same as the first.

  ‘Right,’ she said to herself, a bit less certainly. She moved her head fractionally and saw yet another one, right at the top of the tower of crowns on the cheese table. And a fourth on one of the shelves that ran around the wall. And she could see what looked like a fifth and a sixth hanging on a chair arm – and she couldn’t help spotting at least six ruby orbs, several sceptres and umpteen diamond rings, twinkling amidst the golden chaos.

  She took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she announced to the room in a decisive voice. ‘What this place needs is some organization. Fast.’

  SHE TIMED HERSELF on her watch. Thirty-five minutes of non-stop action later, she had collected a total of fifteen emerald crowns and had stacked them in the throne room beside the Reappearing Rose Bower. Next to the crowns she’d assembled four other piles, consisting of nine diamond rings, ten orbs, thirteen sceptres and four fur-trimmed cloaks, all of which seemed to have moths. April stopped to catch her breath; it had never occurred to her that gold was so incredibly heavy.

  ‘So now,’ she said, ‘I just have to find which ones are the right ones.’

  She picked up the least mothy of the four cloaks and draped it round her shoulders; it was miles too long for her. Then she slipped on one of the rings, picked up an orb and sceptre, and finally grabbed the top crown on the stack and placed it on her head. Then, feeling as if she were a contestant in a fancy-dress competition, she shuffled across to the throne, cloak dragging behind her, and sat down.

  Her own face, pink with exertion, looked back at her from the portrait.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s try another lot.’

  She took off the jewellery and the cloak and dumped it all to one side, went over to start dressing herself in a whole new set – and then suddenly had a thought. An awful, chilling thought.

  What if she’d been wearing the right crown, but all the other items had been wrong? Or what if it had been the right cloak, but the wrong crown, ring, orb and sceptre? Or the right orb, the right crown, the right cloak and the right ring, but the wrong sceptre? It was no good, she realized, just randomly going through the piles – she would have to try on every possible combination.

  ‘And there must be hundreds,’ she said out loud. ‘Maybe thousands! It’ll take hours and hours and hours, and Stuart’s going to be upside down in the museum the entire time.’ She could feel herself beginning to panic; her insides felt cold and hollow.

  ‘I must be doing it wrong,’ she exclaimed, her voice a pathetic squeak. ‘I’ve missed something – I must have.’

  She ran back to the treasury, and looked around desperately. The dog was still nosing about; its stumpy tail wagged when it saw her, and April scooped it up and gave it a quick cuddle. And then, since she definitely needed to do some proper thinking (and not just closing her eyes and waiting for inspiration, the way she normally did), she picked her way between the piles of treasure, sat down on the little footstool right in the corner of the room and put her chin in her hand.

  And saw something.

  On the wall right next to her, directly underneath the lowest shelf, invisible to someone standing up, were five lines of writing.

  Clues. Clues that she would have seen if only, at the start, she had sat down for just one minute. April’s groan of despair sent the small dog leaping off her lap, and she buried her face in her hands. Crown crowning the column presumably meant that the correct one was the topmost of the huge pillar of crowns on the table. And Cloak close to the claret must have been the cloak she’d found on the floor near the tipped-over goblet, since ‘claret’ meant red wine.

  But now it was too late – all the rings and crowns and cloaks and sceptres were completely mixed up and she had no idea which one was which. She would just have to work her way through every possible combination with as much speed as possible.

  ‘Stuart, I am so sorry,’ she muttered, standing up. She stepped over the dog, which was licking something on the floor beneath the table, and then she paused, and peered down.

  The thing he was licking was a dried wine stain.

  It only took her a few seconds to gallop back into the throne room and start examining the cloaks, and she jumped into the air in triumph when she found a small stain on the second cloak. She tossed it onto the throne, and sprinted back to the treasury, where she sat back down on the stool, focused on the clues, and thought deeply.

  Orb orbiting.

  Orbiting meant going round something. Like a satellite orbiting the earth. Or the earth orbiting the—

  ‘Sun!’ she shouted. There, in the centre of the treasury, was the golde
n candleholder shaped like the sun, and she’d found all sorts of treasure on it, including one of the orbs, balanced on a bracelet. She went over to the candleholder now, and noticed that odd drips of wax were scattered across the other objects on it, and then she made another dash to the throne room. It only took half a minute to find the orb whose ruby sides were similarly spotted with wax.

  Ring around the rodent route.

  Rodent = mouse, she thought.

  So where had she seen the mouse go? She remembered that it had zipped across the room towards the tall gilded cabinet in one corner, and when she went over there and crouched down, she could see a tiny gap between the cabinet and the wall, and a trail of mouse poos indicating its usual route. But – and she felt almost certain about this – she hadn’t found any of the nine diamond rings in this particular corner. She swept the patch of floor clean with one foot, then lay down full length and put her eye to the crack. And there, looking right back at her through what seemed to be a tiny circular picture frame, was a mouse, its eyes like drops of ink. It whisked away in a instant, and April was left looking at the miniature frame. And she realized what it was: a diamond ring, wedged sideways between wall and cabinet.

  As she heaved the cabinet away from the wall, she was shaking; if she hadn’t read the clues, she’d never have found the right ring. It tinkled to the floor, and she hooked it over one finger and carried on the search.

  Sceptre in the central slider.

  ‘What slides in this room?’ she asked herself, and the answer was easy: a drawer. The cabinet that she’d just wrenched from the wall had five drawers – she’d searched it earlier and found at least two sceptres in there. She opened the middle drawer now and looked at the tumbled treasure inside. There was nothing to mark the contents – no wine stains, no wax – but as she stood looking, she saw a microscopic movement. A spider the size of a grape seed was dangling on a near-invisible thread between a ruby coronet and an opal bracelet, and April remembered something. When she’d taken one of the sceptres out of the cabinet, it had felt sticky, and she had brushed some grey thread off her fingers.

  This time, as she careered from treasury to throne room, the little dog ran at her heels, as if joining in a game. It watched as she picked through the sceptres, and its tail appeared to wag when she found one with a swathe of cobweb still wrapped around one end.

  ‘And now just the crown,’ said April, an idea already forming. ‘Do you like cheese?’ she asked the dog. She went and found the slab of bread and cheese that had been resting on top of the stack of crowns, broke off a crumb or two and offered them to the dog. It hoovered them up. Then she arranged the crowns in a long line, picked up the dog, and carried it along the row, nose downwards, just a few centimetres from the crowns.

  The dog sniffed violently at the fourth one, and when she repeated the exercise, going from the other end this time, the same thing happened again. Triumphantly she stuck the crown on her head, and hurriedly dressed herself in the enormous cloak. Then she put the dog under one arm, picked up the sceptre and the orb, and staggered over to the throne, feeling as if she were running a marathon. And she was just centimetres away from completing it when she tripped over the hem of the cloak, lurched sideways and dropped both dog and orb.

  She flailed in the air, missed the dog, caught the orb, and landed on the throne on one hip, glimpsing her pink, horrified face in the oval mirror. Over it, a scarlet letter T suddenly appeared, and then the world gave a sudden shiver and she found herself back – where?

  IN TOTAL DARKNESS. In stifling heat.

  She reached out a hand and felt a wall that was somehow soft and warm – a heavy cloth, she realized, draped right over the Reappearing Rose Bower, and she grabbed a fold of it and pulled. It slid away, letting in cooler air, and she saw that she was in a shed of some kind, with chinks of late-afternoon light shining through the plank walls, and odd shapes looming in the shadows nearby.

  ‘Oi!’ shouted a desperate, cracked voice from directly beneath her. ‘Is that you, April? Are you back?’

  ‘Stuart!’

  She jumped off the seat, grabbed the Magic Star, and waited anxiously for Stuart to reappear. The lever clacked and ratcheted three times and the twining silver stems relaxed, revealing a small slumped figure on the throne.

  ‘You were ages,’ said Stuart huskily.

  ‘I know. And I’m so, so sorry. But do you know where we are? Has the trick been stolen, or is this a museum store … or what?’ She was searching the shed as she spoke, and her fingers found and rattled at a locked door. ‘And we can’t even get out!’ she added, trying not to panic.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ said Stuart. ‘I’ve been under that throne the whole time, and I couldn’t really hear what was going on. I know there was a lorry journey, and lots of moving around and crashing and banging, and then’ – Stuart’s mouth was so dry that his words turned into a series of coughs – ‘and then it went totally quiet,’ he continued, catching his breath, ‘and it’s been quiet for ages now.’

  ‘But why didn’t you use the lever to get out of there for a while?’ asked April. ‘Just for a quick explore, or some fresh air? I would have done.’

  ‘Because I didn’t know what would happen if you came back and I wasn’t in the right place.’ It had been so horrible and hot and claustrophobic, and his head had begun pounding so badly that a couple of times he’d nearly pulled the lever – his fingers had curled around it – but each time he’d had a dreadful vision of April completing her puzzle at exactly the same moment, and getting horribly squashed in the insides of the mechanism. ‘I didn’t dare, just in case something went wrong.’

  ‘Oh,’ said April. ‘Thank you.’ There was a pause. Stuart couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear her taking odd, irregular breaths.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  When she spoke, it was in a very small, un-April-like voice. ‘You’re braver than I am,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have put up with that. I wasn’t even brave enough to go on the adventure on my own. I took the dog with me.’

  Stuart’s stomach seemed to do a flip. ‘You took Charlie? Where is he?’

  ‘Still there,’ said April. ‘I tripped over and dropped him just as I was coming back. I’m so, so sorry.’

  In the terrible silence that followed, there was the sudden sound of a key turning. Stuart jumped up and April stood tensely beside him.

  The door opened.

  Two identical heads were silhouetted in the low summer light.

  ‘I told you so!’ shrieked one of them. ‘I told you they hadn’t left that exhibition room.’

  ‘May!’ shouted April. ‘And June! How did you find us?’

  ‘How did you get in there?’

  ‘How do we get out?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Where are we now?’

  A million triplet questions seemed to fill the air, all of them unanswered, all of them incredibly loud. Stuart’s head began to hurt rather a lot and he sat down again. The questions changed tack.

  ‘What’s wrong with Stuart?’

  ‘Why’s he so blotchy?’

  ‘What’s he been doing?’

  ‘Are you all right, Stuart?’

  ‘Do you need fresh air?’

  ‘Are you thirsty?’

  Stuart nodded to the last question, and one of the triplets ran outside again.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked April, for about the fortieth time.

  ‘In the big shed in the corner of Dad’s builder’s yard,’ said the other girl. ‘It occurred to me that he might be able to store the tricks for a while, so I rang him up. And he happened to have a van coming back from a job, so they went straight to the museum and picked up everything. Rod Felton was very grateful.’

  ‘So all the illusions are in here?’ asked April. She pulled a tarpaulin away from some veiled lumps in the corner. ‘They’ve dumped the Book of Peril on its side,’ she said indignantly.

 
‘What I want to know,’ said her sister, ‘is where you disappeared to. May waited outside the exhibition while I went to phone Dad, and she said that you never left the room. Obviously I didn’t believe her because she’s always such a nutcase, but when hours went by and you and Stuart didn’t turn up, we came back to look for you, and now I realize that May was actually right. So where were you? And how did you get into a locked shed?’

  April shook her head. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s not just my secret, it’s Stuart’s.’

  Running footsteps came from outside, and May reappeared with a mug and a large bottle of water. ‘Here you are,’ she said, pouring a mugful for Stuart. ‘I filled it from the tap.’ He drank the lot, and she poured him another.

  ‘So, Stuart,’ said June, looking stern and serious. ‘I think it’s high time May and I knew what was really going on. We’ve told your dad that you’re working late at the museum, and we’ve told our parents that April’s gone round to your house – not to mention borrowing Dad’s keys without him knowing – and we’re tired of covering for you both and we want to know the truth.’

  Stuart glugged the second mugful of water and held it out for a refill.

  ‘Because it’s not fair, is it, if we keep helping you but you don’t tell us anything?’ said May screechily. ‘It’s not fair at all.’

  He drank the third mugful, thought about a fourth, and then realized that he had begun to feel sick. Very, very sick.

  ‘So come on, Stuart,’ said June, folding her arms and using a phrase that she was ever afterwards going to regret. ‘Spit it out.’

  Stuart did.

  HE DIDN’T REMEMBER much about the journey home on the bus. He was feeling a bit like a strand of cooked spaghetti and lay limply across the double seat at the back, while the triplets looked at him anxiously.

  His father, when he opened the front door to Stuart, looked even more anxious. ‘I’m not sure whether or not to seek professional attention,’ he kept saying as Stuart lay on the sofa with a cold cloth on his forehead, ‘or whether this is a quotidian childhood ailment which boiled fluids, sufficient time and simple analgesia will alleviate.’