“We have to get her out of there,” Mattie said, checking the glass door’s handles. They were locked tight. “Can you get it to open?”
“I don’t know!” Eliot fumbled with the buttons on the side. He pushed the green ones.
Nothing.
He pushed the yellow ones.
Still nothing.
“What do I do?” Eliot began to push all the buttons and yet nothing continued to happen.
“Try the green buttons again,” Mattie cried. “I’ll lift up the door.”
But nothing worked.
Panting, the boys peered down at Caroline. There was a leaf stuck to her sweater. No, Mattie realized. That wasn’t a leaf. That was a Beezus.
“What do I do? What do I do?” Eliot moaned, studying the keypad. The green lights kept blinking and he slapped his palm against them. “We can’t leave her here!”
“We won’t!” Mattie reassured him. “We’ll figure it out. You’re really good at computers, right? You can fix this!”
“I can’t,” Eliot moaned. “I don’t know the first thing about these computers. What if I hit the wrong button? Anything could happen.”
Or nothing could continue to happen, which was almost worse. Caroline was stuck. She was going to get caught and because the boys wouldn’t leave her, they were going to get caught too.
Mattie forced himself to think clearly. He walked around the pod and stopped. “What about the red button?” Mattie asked, pointing to the pod’s broad, shiny side.
Eliot joined him and the boys stared at the red button. It sat alone, close to the pod’s top.
“What if it’s an alarm?” Eliot asked, his voice climbing. “It could bring the teachers.”
Mattie nodded slowly. The button could indeed be an alarm and it could indeed bring the teachers. “But what if it’s the lid’s release?”
Eliot looked at Mattie. Mattie looked at Eliot. Eliot leaned forward and jammed his thumb against the red button.
THERE WAS A CLICK CLICK. The red light by the red button illuminated. The pod’s top swooshed up with a chilly breeze and Caroline’s eyes slowly opened. She blinked at the ceiling and then at Mattie and Eliot and then, finally, she sat up.
Eliot threw his arms around her. “You’re so stupid!”
“You’re stupid!” Caroline thumped her brother, but he didn’t let go. She looked around the room. “What’s going on? Where am I?”
Eliot pulled back. “You don’t remember? Did you hit your head?”
“No!” Caroline snapped, but she pressed both hands against her head to be sure. “I don’t think so. What’s going on?”
“Oh, my God,” Eliot moaned. “She came back an idiot. My parents are going to kill me.”
Mattie shoved Eliot to the side. “You’re under the cemetery,” Mattie said. “We went into the mausoleum and found that tomb, remember?”
Caroline’s stony expression indicated she clearly did not.
“Uh, we figured out how to move the tomb,” Mattie continued and pointed to the stairs behind them. “We came down and found the other students. They’re sleeping in these pod things.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” Caroline said. Her dark eyes were wide.
“What do you remember?” Mattie asked.
“I remember…” Caroline twisted to see the room and the stairs and the door tucked into the ceiling. “I remember standing at the stone wall—the one by the garden—and Mattie ran off and we followed—”
“That was almost an hour ago,” Mattie interrupted.
“The pod made you forget,” Eliot said. “I wonder if…” Eliot spun around to study the control panel again. “I wonder if the longer you’re in the pod, the more you forget?”
Mattie stared at his brother’s pod. How much would Carter remember? Would he know what happened? Would he remember who Mattie was?
“Do you think Carter will forget he’s a jerk?” Mattie wondered.
“It’s science, Mattie, not magic.” Eliot helped his sister down from the pod. Caroline was a little wobbly on her feet, and Beezus clung to her shoulder like a pirate on a pitching ship.
“I can’t leave him,” Mattie said. “We have to get him out. We’ll take him to the police and we’ll tell them—”
“What?” Eliot asked, supporting Caroline with one arm. “He won’t remember anything. He’s been in there for over a week, Mattie. What if we hurt him?”
What if they did? Mattie stared at his friends and then stared at Carter’s pod. He just couldn’t bring himself to leave.
Caroline disentangled herself from Eliot. She was standing on her own now, much less wobbly and much more like herself. “Mattie, we’ll come back for him and, next time, we’ll be ready. We’ll get caught if we try to drag him back to school. Do you want that?”
“No!”
“Then let’s go!” Caroline said and all three of them darted for the stairs—but not before Mattie took one last look at his brother’s pod. Carter had been in there for days. How much of his memory would be lost? How much of what made Carter, well, Carter would still be there?
“C’mon, Mattie!” Caroline grabbed Mattie’s hand and hauled him up the steps.
They paused at the very top, listening for voices before Eliot pressed the exit button to release the tomb. It slid open and they emerged into the mausoleum, shut the tomb behind them, and ran into the cemetery. Mattie never thought he’d be so happy to see that ugly, broken-down angel.
Or the prickly grass.
Or the sky.
Or…well, everything.
“What a disaster,” Caroline said after Eliot explained everything she had missed. She tried to untangle Beezus from her hair. It didn’t work very well. The poor rat had wads of her hair clutched in his paws and teeth and his eyes were bugged out of his head.
“We’re in worse shape than when we started,” Caroline said and gave Beezus a yank. He ripped free from her head with a chunk of her hair.
Mattie frowned. He kind of sort of might possibly agree with Caroline on this one. “At least we know where they are,” he said at last.
“But how are we going to get them out?” Caroline wanted to know.
Mattie had no idea how they would do that. He turned to Eliot. “What do you think?”
“I think we’re in pretty bad shape,” Eliot said with a nod.
Mattie’s heart squeezed. Eliot didn’t have to sound nearly so pleased about it. Then again, it wasn’t like it was Eliot’s brother who was trapped down there.
“But,” Eliot continued, holding up one finger and smiling. “We do know one more thing than we did before.”
“What’s that?” Mattie asked.
Eliot’s smile spread into a grin. It was the same grin Mattie would eventually recognize every time Eliot’s magnificent mind thought of something magnificent. “Now we know the clones can be overloaded—”
“And,” Caroline interrupted as a grin eerily similar to her brother’s spread across her face. “When the clones are overloaded, they malfunction.”
“What are you…oh!” Mattie straightened. They were talking about what Karloff said, about the clones—how they were always getting overloaded and when they overloaded they went wrong. Now Mattie was starting to get it.
“Exactly,” Eliot said. He rubbed his palms together. “Think of the mayhem.”
Mattie nodded. “The Rooster won’t know what hit him.”
THE SPENCERS THOUGHT ABOUT THE ROOSTER and mayhem and clones. They laughed and laughed. Mattie didn’t laugh, though. He couldn’t stop thinking about how his brother was stuck deep beneath the mausoleum.
“We have to wake them up,” Mattie said. “We have to get Carter and everyone out of there. If we tell the whole school what happened, Rooney and the teachers will have to stop.”
Caroline’s expression turned worried again. “Mattie, if all the adults are in on it, who’s going to make them stop? Who’s going to help us?”
Eliot nodded. “She�
��s right. If we free the others, the Rooster and the teachers will just put them back.”
Mattie studied his friends. They had a very good point and it was definitely a problem. But surely there was a way around the very good point and the definite problem?
Maybe?
Mattie chewed his thumbnail. It didn’t help him come up with any ideas, but it was something to do. His mind kept coming back to calling the police, but every time he thought of it he was reminded of one of his father’s favorite topics: the burden of truth. For Mattie, it had always sounded like when you stood up for what was right. But Mr. Larimore said it was so much simpler than that. It was just having to prove something did or did not happen. Just like now. Mattie had to prove Rooney was cloning students.
But how? How could he convince the police to come to the school? How could he convince anyone of what was going on in the basement and cemetery? Take a piece of pipe? A chunk of wires?
Mattie looked around the cemetery and then at the school in the faraway distance. He looked at the overgrown grass and the overgrown ivy. He looked at Munchem’s imposing iron fence. The gate was so far down the driveway, Mattie almost couldn’t see it, but he knew it was locked. It was always locked except for when—
“The parents!” Mattie cried.
Eliot and Caroline stared at him. “What about them?” Caroline asked.
“They’re the only people coming to Munchem who aren’t in league with the teachers!” Mattie ran to the entrance of the cemetery, looking from the gate to the school and back again. “We have to overload the clones during the end-of-term parent dinner. They’ll be so horrified, they’ll call the police and the Rooster will get arrested!”
The Spencers looked at each other, and Mattie crossed his arms. “It’s the only way.”
Caroline nudged her brother. “He’s right. We need help.”
Eliot shook his head. “Nope, what we need is a way to overload the clones while we’re stuck at that dinner. How’s that going to work?”
Eliot was right. If they were sitting at the dinner, they couldn’t mess with any of the clones’ wiring. Nervousness began to creep through Mattie again. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
“I have an idea.”
But like any good idea, Eliot needed time (plus a few items from Marilyn).
“This better be worth it,” Eliot muttered to Mattie as he carried a small pile of computer parts into their room. It was evening two days later, and Room 14A was empty since the boys were preparing for the parent dinner.
Preparing might be a bit of a stretch. Doyle was somewhere—probably delivering more baked goods. Bell and Kent were in study hall again—or were still, Mattie wasn’t quite clear on that. Eliot was muttering to himself and gluing black plastic to a small metal frame. And Mattie? Well, Mattie was staring at his essay.
What kind of person had he become at Munchem?
What kind of person indeed. Since arriving at Munchem Academy, Mattie had thrown a dirty sponge into Doyle’s face. He had sneaked into the headmaster’s office. He had found a cloning machine. He had tried to save his brother—only to get his brother caught and cloned. And now—Mattie sighed—now he had to fix it.
Eliot burst into laughter and held the small metal frame closer to the lamp. Mattie watched him and noted that Eliot had a laugh that was bigger than he was and maybe a little bit like an evil scientist’s laugh before he melted down a hero.
“What are you doing?” Mattie asked.
Eliot shook his head and hunched over his desk. “I’ll show you in a minute.”
Mattie squirmed and looked at his essay again. By now, he could recite it backward and forward and while standing on his head—which he couldn’t actually do, but thought would be far more useful than reading paragraphs on what he’d learned at Munchem.
“The point isn’t what you think is important,” Mrs. Hitchcock had reminded him for the eleventh—or eleven millionth—time earlier that afternoon. “The point is what your parents find important, what the world will find important.”
All term, Mattie had been looking forward to this. He was going to see his parents. He was going to get his chance to make it up to them and to go home. But if he did well, he’d go home and leave Carter.
And if he didn’t do well, he’d have to stay here and risk getting cloned.
“Prepare to be amazed,” Eliot announced. He held a black plastic remote control above his head. It was pieced together with silver tape and had a crooked antenna. “Ta-da!”
Mattie cocked his head. “You’re going to play a movie for them?”
“No.” Eliot scowled. “Remember when I said lots of electronics could interrupt the clones and make them mess up? Well, I’m going to do that. I’ll overload the clones’ systems and force a malfunction.”
“How?”
“Spark gap generator.” Eliot held out the remote for Mattie’s inspection. “The energy creates an electromagnetic pulse—kind of like when speakers crackle right before your cell phone rings. The only problem is it’s really small so I’ll have to be close to the clones.”
“Where did you learn to do this stuff?” Mattie asked.
Eliot shrugged. “Other kids read comics, I read computer manuals.”
Mattie studied the silver tape and the crooked antenna. The plastic remote was small enough that Eliot could probably tuck it inside his Munchem red sweater. If he kept it under the table at dinner, no one would ever know it was there.
“Does it work?” Mattie asked. Eliot narrowed his eyes. “I mean, how does it—”
The door to 14A swung open and Doyle bounced through. “Dinnertime!” Doyle smiled at them and, slowly, Eliot began to grin back.
“How’s it going, Doyle?” he asked, easing the remote into one hand. Mattie’s heart tripped when he saw Eliot’s thumb began to move over the keypad. There was the faintest crackling.
“It’s going great, Eliot!” Doyle’s eyes went bright as he set down his schoolbooks on the study table.
“How great?” Eliot asked.
Doyle didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Doyle’s head snapped back, his shoulders straightened and stared at something only Doyle the Clone could see. One arm raised above his head, finger pointed to the ceiling.
“Eliot?” Mattie said, his eyes cutting from Eliot to Doyle and back again. “I think—”
“I think it works,” Eliot said as Doyle began to pirouette around the room. One part of Mattie was horrified. Another part of him was impressed with Doyle’s ballet. All he needed was some tights and a ballerina bun.
Doyle spun past them as Eliot tucked the remote in his pocket. “Prepare to be amazed at parents’ night,” he said.
“Prepare to save the others on parents’ night,” Mattie reminded him.
“Same difference.”
MUNCHEM HAD NEVER LOOKED SO CLEAN. Mattie knew Mrs. Hitchcock had asked the upperclassmen to decorate the dining hall for the end-of-term dinner, but he hadn’t expected it to look nice—well, as nice as one could make a dining hall look, which was to say there were decorative streamers and embroidered place mats. But it still smelled like old fish.
Headmaster Rooney paced the length of the room, eyeing each of the students. His dark suit was pressed and his red hair was slicked down. It made him shorter than usual and maybe that was why he looked so angry.
“Now listen up!” Rooney shouted. The force of his voice rocked him onto his toes. “Your parents will be joining us shortly. You are to greet them. You are to eat with your roommates and, after dinner, you will read your essays when you are called upon. Do you understand?”
Everyone muttered and looked at their shoes.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” the headmaster shouted.
Everyone nodded and still looked at their shoes. No one wanted to meet the headmaster’s eyes. Well, no one but Mattie, who couldn’t look away. Again.
“What are you doing?” Eliot muttered. “Look away.”
“I can’t!” Mat
tie whispered. This is what mice must feel like sitting in front of a snake, he thought as the headmaster glared at him.
“Go on then,” Headmaster Rooney said, eyeing Mattie. “I expect your best behavior tonight or else.”
Mattie’s heart jerked into his throat. He forced himself to walk calmly to his place in line, next to Eliot and the other boys from 14A, as their parents arrived.
“Dude,” Eliot muttered, turning his head toward Mattie as the room began to fill. “Doesn’t Doyle’s mom look just like him?”
Doyle’s mom did indeed, and Mattie was so transfixed by how she embraced her clone son—and how the clone embraced her—that he entirely missed the woman waving at him.
“Mattie?” she cried. People stopped, people stared, and Mrs. Larimore smiled.
“Yes, it is me,” she said, placing one hand against her chest. “I know. I’m excited for you too.”
Eliot’s eyes bugged. “Is that your mom?”
Mrs. Larimore shoved past two other mothers and teetered toward Mattie. Her high heels made clackety clackety clack noises against the hardwood floors that made Mattie’s chest feel tight. He knew he missed his mother, but he didn’t know he missed her noises too.
“Mom!”
Mrs. Larimore threw her arms around him. She smelled like roses and laundry detergent and home. Mattie buried his face in her neck.
“Where’s Dad?” Mattie asked when he finally pushed himself away.
“Just saying hello to your brother.” Mrs. Larimore nodded her head to their right and, sure enough, there was Carter the Clone shaking hands with Mr. Larimore and the headmaster. Mattie had never seen his father look so happy. Mr. Larimore’s jowls quivered as he pumped Headmaster Rooney’s hand up and down. Headmaster Rooney looked just as delighted. It made Mattie wonder if the Rooster would want a picture with his dad too. Then the headmaster’s eyes met Mattie’s, catching him staring.
“Do you have your poem ready?” Mrs. Larimore asked, touching her fingers to her dark, upswept hair.
The Boy Who Knew Too Much Page 18