by Henry Clark
“What?”
“It was the first company to put an eraser on the end of a pencil!”
Tom fell to his knees and clutched his head. “Oh no! The pencil I had been using to write out the hexagrams—that’s what gave Killbreath the idea! And the Trouble hexagram contained the Morse code message erase! That’s what it meant! This is all my fault!”
“No, it isn’t,” I tried to reassure him.
“It is! If I’d only made more mistakes, the eraser would have been worn down, and he wouldn’t have noticed it!”
“Okay, then,” I couldn’t resist saying. “Maybe it is your fault. He never would have gotten the idea from one of my pencils.”
“So what we have to do”—Frankie enunciated slowly and deliberately, as if she were talking to children—“is make sure Killbreath never finds the pencil. Then his family will never become rich and powerful, and the future will go back to being what it was when we first left it. We can fix this!”
“I can’t believe something as simple as a pencil is at the bottom of all this,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Tom, recovering quite quickly from his guilt trip. “I once read a book where a zucchini-colored crayon was at the bottom of a plot to take over the world.”
“Sounds awful.”
“It wasn’t that bad. A little loony at times—”
“Focus!” Frankie hissed. “Our best chance of getting the pencil is between the time they brought us into the barn and the moment Killbreath took it to write down our names.”
We joined her, looking over the hayloft’s edge at the barn floor below.
“They dragged us in,” said Tom, reviewing what had happened. “I managed to kick one of them in the shins—”
“That was me,” I said.
“Oh. Sorry. And then they tied us to the posts, left the burlap sacks over our heads, and frisked us. They spread our stuff out on that bench down there. The pencil was tucked into my I-Ching book for at least half an hour before Killbreath found it.”
“So, it’s during that time that we’ll have to get it back,” said Frankie. “Any ideas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Mr. Ganto jumps down, knocks their heads together, unties us, and we get the pencil back.”
“Do you remember that happening?” asked Frankie.
“No. Of course not.”
“Then it didn’t happen. Whatever we did, our earlier selves didn’t notice. If they had noticed, they would have behaved differently afterward, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
“My head hurts!” Tom complained.
“It’s lack of sleep,” I assured him.
“It’s time-travel nuttiness,” he corrected me. “Paradoxical!”
“Whatever we do to keep that pencil from Killbreath,” said Frankie, “we have to do it so cleverly that our earlier selves are unaware that we’re doing it.”
“Okay,” I said, eyeing a coil of rope hanging off a peg on the opposite side of the barn. “How about this?”
My friends huddled around me as I explained my plan.
CHAPTER 17
Thunk! Clangity-Clank! Thzzzt! and Klonk!
My friends, of course, didn’t like my plan, so we came up with two alternate plans and they voted unanimously to make my plan THE LAST RESORT. We barely had time to set up a few necessary props before the barn door flew open and our earlier selves were dragged in by Killbreath and his boys.
Frankie, Tom, and I were well hidden, watching from above, as our earlier selves, with bags over our heads—or maybe over their heads—got tied up below us. And that was strange. It would have been worse if I had been able to see our faces—that would have been really freaky—but it was bad enough knowing the scrawny kids being bullied below us were… us. I had seen prisoners with bags over their heads on television. I tried to imagine what it would be like to see one of those bags pulled off and the face beneath it turn out to be mine. It would definitely make me think of prisoners differently.
Killbreath warned our twins not to speak unless spoken to. He spread out their possessions—including the Time Trombone and the book containing the history-rewriting pencil—on the bench. He and the other two creeps, Bert and Zack, got into a huddled conversation about whether or not there might be other “runners” in the area.
I remembered hearing their conversation during the time my head had been in the sack. I also remembered some odd noises—thunk! clangity-clank! thzzzt! and klonk!—along with an argument about somebody getting drunk. Maybe those noises had nothing to do with our trying to snatch the pencil. Then again, maybe they did. I would have paid more attention if I had known there was going to be a quiz.
Killbreath and his boys didn’t notice the mouse.
The mouse was plan A. He moved stealthily up the leg of the bench and raised his head just high enough to see over the top. Then he ducked back down, and waited.
Frankie insisted the mouse’s name was Melvin. She warned us that if anything scared Mel, she would lose what little control she had over him, and he would need time to calm down before she could use him to retrieve her bracelet later on.
Mel’s head once again came up over the bench’s side. The rest of his body followed, and he flattened himself against the wood, crawling commando-style toward the pencil. He got as far as Tom’s flashlight, hid behind it, and peered cautiously around it.
Killbreath and Bert had their backs to the bench. Zack sat down on a grain bin and started picking his teeth with a bowie knife. He took a swig from a little brown jug he held in the crook of one arm.
Mel broke from cover and ran the length of the Shagbolt. He peeked around the end of the case, less than a foot away from his goal. He took a hesitant step forward.
Thunk!
The bowie knife embedded itself in the bench only a whisker’s width ahead of him. Every hair on Mel’s body stood on end and, looking more like a hedgehog than a mouse, he dived off the bench, hit the floor, and disappeared down a knothole. Zack ambled over, grinning, and wiggled his knife out of the wood.
Plan B, I said to myself.
Tom glanced at me, gave a thumbs-up, then turned and headed for the back of the loft. He grabbed a rope we had tied to a nail, and lowered himself out the door to the barnyard below.
Plan B involved Tom causing a commotion outside and, we hoped, drawing all three slave catchers out to check on it. During the frantic few minutes before the arrival of Killbreath and his boys, we had scoured the barnyard for usable noise makers. We left some rusted pots and pans from the remains of the farmhouse piled up behind one of the bigger trees. Tom was supposed to make a racket with these, then run for his life. If the slave catchers took the bait and left us by ourselves, Frankie would drop down and grab the pencil.
Clangity-clank! Clangity-clank!
The sound matched what I remembered. I hadn’t been sure it would—otherwise, I would have told Frankie to skip her experiment with Melvin. It wasn’t too loud, though, and I wondered if it was enough to trick everybody into going out. The rest of what I remembered hearing at the time didn’t give me a clue. I had been too scared to wonder about the noises around me.
All three of the men looked in the direction of the noise. Killbreath raised a finger to his lips, nodded Bert toward the door, then tapped Zack on the chest and pointed to the floor, indicating he should stay. Killbreath followed Bert out.
So plan B got rid of only two of them.
Plan C.
THE LAST RESORT.
Me.
Zack wasn’t happy about being left behind. He jammed his hands in his pockets, kicked a corncob across the floor, and returned to the jug he had left on top of the grain bin.
Frankie threw a pebble across the length of the barn. It rattled in a horse stall and Zack crouched, pulled out his knife, and crept over to investigate.
The moment his back was turned, I rolled off the crossbeam I had been hiding on near the ceiling and plummeted toward the bench dire
ctly below me.
Thzzzt! went the rope that circled my waist and looped over the beam as Mr. Ganto, who had the rope’s other end, let it out from his place near the back of the loft. He could raise and lower me, like I was a human piñata. I hoped I didn’t get clubbed—I didn’t want to see candy bars burst out of my butt.
I was in my underwear. A dress—or even jeans and a sweatshirt—might have snagged on something and given me away. My boxer shorts had little blue elephants on them. I decided, if we managed to save the future, I would try to have more say in underwear purchases.
I descended rapidly and then lurched to a halt about two feet above the bench, like a burglar dropping down from a skylight in a movie—a burglar who had forgotten to put his pants on.
I reached for the pencil. My fingers grazed it and then I was swinging away from it, twisting wildly at the end of the rope. I made swimming motions with my hands, trying to get back to where I wanted to be, but that only made me spin faster, like one of the midway rides at Camlo’s carnival, the kind that make you puke. I shouldn’t have thought of puke. It’s not a good thing to think of when you’re spinning. The barn whirled around me and I felt myself getting ready to spew.
I tried to remember if, when I was tied up with a bag over my head, I had smelled vomit. The bag had smelled like rotten potatoes, so it was difficult to tell. But nobody had said, “Hey, where did all this puke come from?” so I guessed I had managed to keep it to myself. I didn’t remember the sound of upchucking, and that’s not something you quickly forget.
I lunged for the edge of the bench, caught it, and pulled myself hand over hand down its length. I touched the pencil, but before I could get my fingers around it, I was shooting back into the air even faster than I had dropped—tzzzht! the sound was reversed—and I saw Zack turning around below me. Mr. Ganto was pulling me up so I wouldn’t be seen.
This, then, I decided, was the Rising, the Ascending, the I-Ching hexagram had mentioned. I wondered how my head figured into it. Zack passed directly beneath me, glancing this way and that, knife at the ready, like one of the bad guys from the video game Grand Theft Stagecoach.
The rope around my waist slipped. Grabbing for it, I clutched my shorts instead, keeping them on even as the rope passed over them and cinched itself tight around my feet. I was dangling upside down by my ankles, like a tea bag about to be dropped into hot water. The hot-water part was pretty accurate. I looked toward the floor and found myself staring into Zack’s upturned face.
The rope broke.
I dropped six inches, hung there for a split second, then plummeted headfirst onto the slave catcher. Klonk! The last of the mysterious sounds was explained as our heads hit with a resounding crack. Just before I lost consciousness I thought, So that’s what the I-Ching meant by head.
I awoke on my back, staring toward the rafters. The broken rope was still swinging, so I knew I had only been out for a few seconds. Sitting up, massaging my scalp, and rolling to my knees took only a moment. There was something urgent I had to do, but I was foggy about the details. Writing was involved. Maybe I had to take a test. Zack was lying next to me, blinking rapidly, mumbling something that sounded like “flying boy.”
When I got up and tried to take a step, I fell over, since my feet were tied together. Loosening the knot, I pulled the rope up around my waist and tightened it like a belt. I probably thought it was a belt, I was so groggy. I got up again, staggered over to the bench, and picked up the pencil.
Still not thinking terribly clearly, I stuck the pencil between my teeth, bit off the eraser, and swallowed it. Then I put the eraser-less pencil back in the book.
The voices of Killbreath and Bert came from outside the barn door, while Zack was rubbing his eyes and shaking his head. Frankie leaned out of the loft and waved frantically at me. I wobbled over to the grain bin, lifted its hinged lid, and fell forward into a mound of musty oats. The lid fell shut over me.
“You ’n’ Zack’ll stand watch,” said Killbreath, to the sound of the barn door opening and footsteps on the threshing floor. “Until we hear from Chester. Jus’ in case it’s bobolitionists.”
I looked out through the crack between the bin and its lid. Zack was getting to his feet, and Killbreath and Bert were approaching him. The end of the rope I was tied to snaked across the floor from the bench to the bin where I was hiding, like a neon sign saying LOOK HERE.
I started to reel it in. Before it had moved six inches, Zack had staggered upright, lurched forward, and stood on it with both feet. I stopped pulling.
“What in tarnation’s wrong with you?” Killbreath demanded as he got closer to Zack. “You reek!”
The front of Zack’s shirt was wet. I could see the jug had fallen and rolled beneath the bench.
“Boy,” muttered Zack, pointing upward.
“Boy is right!” snarled Killbreath. “Didn’t I warn ya ’bout drinking moonshine from Luther Owens’s still? Stuff’ll kill ya! I have a cousin tried some—he was blind for three days! No one works for me drunk!”
Zack threw his shoulders back and tried to stand without wavering.
“I am not drunk!”
I yanked on the rope as hard as I could. Zack flailed his arms and fell over. I reeled in the rest like it was spaghetti and the bin was starving, and I got it all inside without anyone seeing.
“Not drunk, are ya?” Killbreath hauled Zack to his feet and shook him like a dirty doormat.
“I seen somethin’!” Zack protested. “There was blue elephants!”
“And my cousin seen dancin’ dill pickles, afore he couldn’t see nothin’ at all! You ’n’ Bert get outside, an’ watch for bobolitionists. Some un’ was nosin’ round out there!”
Bert took Zack by the arm and assisted him out the door. I watched as Killbreath found a rickety-looking chair near the opposite wall and positioned it near the bench. He picked up one of our cell phones, scowled at it, put it back, then went over and one by one yanked the sacks from the heads of our twins.
“Don’t mean you can talk,” he warned us. “You ain’t been spoke to yet!”
There was a funny taste in my mouth. I wondered if I had eraser breath. I would have thought eating an eraser would make your mouth all fresh and clean.
“Let’s jus’ say I’m a naturally curious cuss,” said Killbreath, beginning a speech I remembered only too well, “so I would like to know whose house it was you broke into, an’ why, of all the swag you coulda taken, you stole a slide horn and some gutta-percha pitcher frames.”
I coiled the excess rope around my waist. My movements caused a loose board in the back of the bin to loosen even further, and with the soft hiss of breakfast cereal pouring into a bowl, moldy oats began spilling out of the bin onto the floor behind it. The opening looked just wide enough for me to fit through. I slid out with the oats and crawled on all fours to where the barn’s side door hung half-open.
I peered out cautiously, looking for any sign of Bert and Zack, and when I saw the coast was clear, I slipped into the barnyard.
Frankie stepped out from behind a tree and waved me urgently over to her. She and Mr. Ganto had gotten out through the loft door, which wasn’t far from the tree, and a rustling in the branches overhead told me where Mr. Ganto was. Bert and Zack were on the other side of the barn from us.
“We have a problem,” said Frankie when I reached them. She had my balled-up clothing tucked under one arm. “Tom wasn’t waiting for us. Mr. Ganto found this on the ground.” She held up Tom’s apron. There was blood on it. “I’m afraid something’s happened to him!”
CHAPTER 18
I Am a Yo-yo
I took the apron. A dark red streak near the pocket glistened. I sniffed it. It was definitely blood.
“The moment I saw you hide in the grain bin, I figured we were all right,” Frankie whispered. “Mr. Ganto and I got out of the barn and did a quick look around. There’s no sign of Tom. Somebody or something may have gotten him; he may have been chased by an
animal; maybe he had an accident. The thing is, we can’t call out for him; otherwise, those goons will hear us. If he’s someplace close, but injured, he knows he can’t call out, either.”
“We have to find him!”
“Mr. Ganto wants me to use the Shagbolt and take us back to our own time. He’s got it up in the tree with him. If Tom is close enough to hear it, he’ll come back with us.”
“And if he’s not?”
“He must still be in range. Not much time has passed.”
“What if he’s unconscious?”
Frankie blinked. “I honestly don’t know. For the Shagbolt to work, I think the conscious mind has to hear the notes and somehow process them. Being unconscious may be a deal breaker.”
“I’m not leaving without Tom,” I informed her. “He’s my best friend.” I looked up into the tree, where I could see Mr. Ganto’s face gazing down at us. “And I’m not leaving until I’ve checked out a riverboat called the Buckeye Beauty. Dwina’s and Seth’s lives may depend on it. Mine, too.”
“Excuses,” said Mr. Ganto.
“I’ll give you one more excuse,” I replied, thinking clearly for the first time since butting heads with Zack. “If we play the Shagbolt now, there are three kids tied up in that barn who will hear it and go back to the future with us. Wouldn’t that complicate things?”
Ganto gave me a sour look, then nodded.
“I had forgotten all about them,” Frankie admitted. “Taking ourselves back to the future with us would mess things up royally.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d hate to have to share my toothbrush. Even with myself.”
Gunshots resounded from inside the barn, announcing the death of an innocent flashlight.
“So what do we do?” asked Mr. Ganto.
I shook Tom’s apron and caught the quarter as it fell from the pocket.
“We can ask the I-Ching where Tom is,” I said, tossing the coin in the air. It came down tails. I picked up a twig and drew a broken line in the dirt.