“Okay,” he said at last. “Just let me put on my robe.”
The building’s halls and stairways were deserted. No neighbors were awake to notice the very small boy in a blue robe with a squirrel riding on his shoulder. Van pushed through the building’s front doors into a rush of cool night air.
Pebble was waiting for him right outside. She grabbed his arm with both hands, yanking him around the stoop and dodging behind two potted pines and a row of trash cans. There she whirled around so that the beams of the streetlamp would fall on her face.
“Thank you for coming out,” said Pebble rapidly, but in the most polite tone Van had ever heard her use. “Sorry if we woke you. But I had to talk to you.”
“Why?” A little shiver ran through Van’s body, even though the night wasn’t cold. “What is it?”
“I smell pretzels,” said the squirrel, sniffing the air. “Do you smell pretzels?”
Pebble’s voice dropped to a whisper. Even with the streetlights, Van couldn’t follow her lips.
“. . . what a pile of lies . . .”
“What?” Van whispered.
Pebble’s eyes flicked over the street. “I want to apologize.”
“For what?”
“For what they did. Jack and Beetle and Rivet.”
“Jack?” squeaked Barnavelt. “Where?”
Van took a little step backward. “Did they make you come here?” he asked warily. “Are you supposed to spy on me? Or talk me into doing what they said?”
“What?” Pebble looked genuinely surprised. “No! Nobody knows I’m here.” She flinched as a shadow fluttered through the lamplight. “But they might be watching.” She whirled back toward Van. “They shouldn’t have done that. Jack and the guards. But that’s their job. I hope you won’t hold it against me. I mean—against all of us.”
Van wondered if anyone else had ever been asked not to hold a grudge about being kidnapped. “Well, I didn’t like it,” he said. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
Pebble’s voice was smaller than before. “So . . . you’re not mad at me?”
“No,” said Van. “I’m not mad at you.”
Pebble’s shoulders seemed to melt. She took a deep breath, her body tensing up again. “Okay,” she said, almost to herself. “Good.”
Van watched her closely. “Why do you care if I’m mad at you?” he asked. “Why do all of you want me on your side, anyway? Is it just because I already know some of your secret stuff?”
“No!” said Pebble quickly. “Well, partly. But it’s—you’re—” She threw her hands up. “You can do stuff other people can’t do!”
Van had spent a lot of his life noticing that other people could do things he couldn’t. They could hear things he didn’t hear, and catch words and meanings he didn’t catch. They always seemed to be taller and stronger and older than he was. With some effort and imagination, Van could generally keep up with everyone else. But the thought that he could do something others couldn’t made him stop breathing for a moment. “Like what?” he asked.
“You can hear the Creatures,” said Pebble. “You can see wishes. You noticed us in the first place.”
Van shrugged. “All the Collectors can do those things too.”
“Yes, but we’re Collectors!” Pebble argued. “You’re the only one from the outside who’s been able to do that stuff since . . . ever.”
“Really?” Van asked hopefully.
“Plus, the other side?” Pebble plunged on. “They’re dangerous. Really dangerous.”
Van folded his arms. “More dangerous than a bunch of guys who steal me out of my bed in the middle of the night and dangle me over a bottomless pit?”
“I told you,” said Pebble. “Jack and the guards aren’t bad guys. They just act like it.”
“Doesn’t that make them bad guys?”
Pebble’s eyebrows rose. She was quiet for so long that Van stopped waiting for an answer.
“It might help me want to be on your side if I knew what that side is,” Van told her. “I mean, what are all of you doing down there? Why are you collecting people’s wishes?”
Pebble flashed another look over her shoulders. “That’s our job. We keep everyone safe.”
“From wishes?”
“From what would happen if everybody’s wishes came true.”
Van shook his head. “What would be so bad about that?”
Pebble looked at him like he’d just asked what was so bad about bubonic plague. “Do you know what kind of things people wish for?” she hissed. “Do you want to get trampled by dinosaurs? Do you want an eight-year-old bully to be king of the whole world? Do you want every food in the world to taste like chocolate ice cream? Do you know how sick of chocolate ice cream you would get?”
“Chocolate ice cream,” sighed the squirrel on Van’s shoulder.
Van hesitated. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because I know.” Pebble’s eyes were wide and exasperated. “I know both sides.” She hunched over, rooting through her coat’s many pockets. “Here.”
She pushed something into Van’s hand. Even in the semidarkness, he could see that it was a photograph, but he couldn’t tell what was in it.
The light of the streetlamp flickered with another sweep of shadowy wings.
Pebble jerked back. “I have to go. Come on, Barnavelt.”
The squirrel hopped from Van’s shoulder to Pebble’s head. “Do you smell pretzels?” Van heard the squirrel squeak again before the two of them whisked away into the dark.
Van hurried back up the stairs to the apartment. The door of his mother’s room was still shut, with only darkness sliding through the gap beneath it. Van slipped into his own room and closed the door. Then he climbed back into his fortress of pillows and turned on the bedside lamp.
The photo Pebble had handed him was old and wrinkled, as if it had been kept in a pocket for a very long time. There were two people in the picture.
One was a slender older man with crinkly blue eyes, gray hair, and a neat white suit. Van recognized him immediately. Mr. Falborg.
Standing next to him was a girl of five or six years old, with big dark eyes and short brown hair that curved against her round cheeks. Mr. Falborg’s hand rested on the girl’s head in a familiar, playful way, and both of them were beaming at the camera.
The girl had some of the biggest ears Van had ever seen. They stuck out through the strands of her hair like . . .
Like mushrooms on the trunk of a tree.
Van held the picture closer.
The girl’s eyes were exactly the color of mossy pennies.
14
A New Pet
VAN moved through the next morning like a small, silent zombie. He poured orange juice onto his cereal instead of milk, and he’d eaten half of it before he noticed that something was wrong. He put on his shirt backward. Twice. And he forgot the Calvin and Hobbes book he meant to bring to the opera house until he and his mother were halfway down the block, and he had to run all the way back home to get it.
Afterward, when he was stuck in a chair at the corner of the rehearsal room, he wished he hadn’t remembered the book at all. Because what he needed wasn’t a comic book. What he needed was several blocks away, shut behind the blue door of a tall white house.
Mr. Falborg’s house had everything. The information he was supposed to steal for the Collectors. Pebble’s history. And, of course, the meaning behind the note. Come and see me as soon as you can. YOU ARE IN TERRIBLE DANGER. The words thumped along with Van’s accelerating heartbeat. As soon as you can. AS SOON AS YOU CAN.
He was staring blankly at the pages of his book, crafting a plan, when a sharp voice said—
“Wad dizzy muscle doing?”
Van looked up.
Peter Grey stood beside him. His face was hard. His eyes were narrow.
“My muscle?” Van repeated.
Peter made an exasperated face. “Your mother,” he repeated, very, very slowly. “What.
Is. She. Doing?”
Van looked around the rehearsal room. His mother was standing near the table where water and tea were set out for the singers. Mr. Grey was beside her. They were smiling, and his mother was patting at a curl of brassy hair that had slipped out of her French twist.
“She’s . . . talking?” said Van.
If Peter had been a balloon, he would have looked ready to pop. “Why. Is. She. Talking. To. My. Father?” he demanded.
“Because they work together?” Van ventured.
“No. Look!” Peter leaned forward again. “Why is she smiling at him like that?”
“My mom smiles at everybody like that.”
“God,” Peter huffed, stalking toward the door. “. . . Russia baby.”
Van put down his book and gazed across the room. His mother and Mr. Grey were still standing together. Suddenly they seemed very close together—and very far away from everyone else. And now that Van thought about it, he wasn’t sure that this was quite the same dazzling smile his mother gave to everybody, from audiences to doormen. There was something different about this particular smile.
All at once, Van needed to get between that smile and Mr. Grey.
He scurried across the shiny wood floor.
“Mom.” He grabbed his mother’s sleeve. “Mom.”
Mr. Grey stopped speaking in midsentence and looked down at Van with a little frown. His mother’s smile stayed bright. “What is it, Giovanni?”
“Mom, I need to ask you something.”
“Well.” Mr. Grey took a step backward. “I’ll speak with you later, Ingrid.”
“Yes.” His mother’s smile could have lit the stage. “Until then.” She turned the smile on Van, who suddenly wished he was wearing sunglasses. “What did you need to ask me?”
“Um . . . I left something at home,” Van improvised. “My other book. Can I go get it?”
“Do you mean, may you walk back to the apartment right now, by yourself?” She reached down and combed a strand of hair out of Van’s eyes, leaving a whiff of lily-scented lotion behind. “No, you absolutely may not.”
Van veered to another path. “Then can I at least go visit Ana in the costume shop? Or see if the prop room is open?”
“Giovanni, they’re unloading from the last production today. You need to stay out of the way.” His mother gave him a scrutinizing look. Then her eyes brightened. “If you don’t feel like sitting in here, why don’t you go play with Peter? He’s probably up in his father’s office.”
Van felt himself brightening too—but not at the prospect of playing with Peter. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll go look for him!”
“Just stay in the building,” his mother called after him.
Van didn’t glance back. Later, if he needed to, he could pretend that he hadn’t heard. With his backpack over his shoulders, he ran straight up the back staircase, along a dark hall, and out onto the street.
He didn’t like lying to his mother. It was hard to keep secrets from someone who knew everything about you, right down to the size of your underwear. But there was no choice.
His shoes smacked the cement as Van tore up the busy sidewalk, his backpack pulling at his shoulders as if it were trying to turn him back.
Gerda opened the blue front door. “Mr. Markson!” She gave him a pleasant but puzzled smile.
“I need to see Mr. Falborg,” Van panted. “Is he home?”
“Come in.” Gerda ushered him inside. Van missed a few of her words in the creak-thump of the closing door. “. . . Tin de parlor, and I’ll tell him yer here.”
Inside the fancy, ferny front room, Van tried to sit down on a white armchair. But his body wouldn’t keep still. Within seconds, it had scooted back off the chair and darted toward the nearest wall. Van scanned the framed photographs and silhouettes and postcards, but there was no sign of that smaller, younger, smilier Pebble anywhere.
He was squinting up at one cut-paper silhouette when, on the window seat just to his left, something gave a twitch.
Van spun around.
The something was a cat. A large, long-haired, pale gray cat. She stretched her claws and arched her spine, rearranging herself in the afternoon sunlight.
Van had never tried to talk to a cat before. But within the last few days, he’d had conversations with a squirrel and two rats, and suddenly, not speaking to the cat seemed like the stupider choice. Especially when she might know everything that Van needed to know.
“You must be Renata.” Van knelt beside the window seat. “I’m Van.”
Renata regarded him through one half-shut hazel eye.
Van swallowed. “You know . . . if you want to talk . . .”
The tip of Renata’s tail twitched.
Van leaned one ear close to her furry snoot. “If you have anything you’d like to tell me . . . maybe about a girl named Pebble, or about a super-secret collection . . . I’m listening.”
The faint, fishy warmth of the cat’s breath brushed his ear. Van held perfectly still, just in case, hidden in that breath, were words he’d never listened for before. He was still crouching there, his ear pressed against the cat’s nose, when Mr. Falborg glided into the room.
“Getting acquainted with Renata?” he asked pleasantly.
Van shot to his feet.
“She’s a lazy old thing,” Mr. Falborg went on. “But that’s just what a cat should be, I suppose.”
Mr. Falborg was dressed in a spotless white suit. His gray hair was neatly combed. His eyes were bright, and his smile was welcoming, and the anxious pounding in Van’s chest became the tiniest bit slower.
“Oh . . . um . . . Mr. Falborg,” Van stammered. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over.”
“Mind? I’ve been expecting you.” Mr. Falborg gestured to an armchair. “Please. Sit.”
Van perched on the edge of the seat.
“I’m sure my message was confusing at best, and frightening at worst.” Mr. Falborg sat down in the opposite armchair. “A hidden note in a bouquet for your mother wasn’t the best place for a long explanation.”
“I just . . . ,” Van began carefully. “I just want to know what it meant.”
Mr. Falborg leaned forward. “Oh, I think you already know.”
An icy wave surged through Van, almost pushing the questions out of him. Are you watching me too? What do you know about the Collectors? How do you know Pebble? What’s really going on here? But he shoved the questions back. Keeping silent was always safer. Besides, from the way Mr. Falborg watched him with those bright, knowing eyes, Van knew he might as well have asked the questions aloud anyway.
Mr. Falborg folded his hands. “Master Markson,” he said, “are you a fan of Calvin and Hobbes?”
This was not where Van had expected the conversation to start. “I’ve read all the books,” he blurted. “More than once. There’s one in my backpack right now.”
“Ah!” Mr. Falborg said warmly. “I can always recognize a fellow collector, and a fellow Calvin and Hobbes fan. Do you remember the comic where Calvin suggests going to the zoo, and Hobbes the tiger says sure, they can go to the zoo, and then maybe they can visit a prison afterward?”
Van nodded. “I remember.”
Mr. Falborg leaned an elbow on the chair’s padded arm. “What do you think the difference is between a zoo and a prison?”
“Maybe . . . ,” Van began, “that we don’t know that the animals don’t want to be in a zoo.”
“A good answer,” said Mr. Falborg appreciatively. “Of course, zookeepers believe they are confining those animals for their own good, to protect them, or preserve them. Not to imprison them.” He paused. “But why should they be the ones who get to decide?”
Van thought. “I suppose because people are people, and animals are just . . . animals.” He threw a quick “no offense” glance at Renata. The cat just looked bored.
“That is what we tell ourselves, isn’t it?” said Mr. Falborg. “But what about the especially intelligent, complex cre
atures? Elephants? Dolphins? Apes? The ones who can paint pictures, communicate with signs, mourn lost loved ones, who can tell us clearly that they do not want to be kept?”
Van felt a thump of sadness. “I don’t know.”
Mr. Falborg craned forward, bracing his elbows on his spotless white knees. “What if there were some creatures very much like us—in some ways even more advanced than us—that wanted only the chance to survive, to live out their natural lives without chains or cages . . . but that humans insisted on confining. Or even destroying. Would that be wrong?”
Pictures of lonely laboratory monkeys clinging to stuffed animals flashed through Van’s mind. “Yes,” he said. “That would be totally wrong.”
Mr. Falborg stared into Van’s eyes. “I am so glad you think so,” he said. Then, abruptly, he got to his feet. “Please follow me.”
Mr. Falborg led the way through the arch and along a hallway. Van thought they’d taken this route on his last visit, but there was so much to see—an entire wall of villages carved in jade, rows of gleaming heraldic shields, an open doorway to a room where hundreds of huge, pincered beetles gleamed in hanging glass boxes—that he kept spotting things he’d definitely never seen before. They twisted around several corners and up a flight of stairs. Mr. Falborg walked quickly, without glancing back. Van scurried after him, trying not to let his eyes snag on the fantastic collections as they whooshed by.
By the time they reached the small room with the red velvet curtains, Van was so dazzled and disoriented he wasn’t sure he could even find his way back out again. Mr. Falborg closed the door. He made a careful survey of the entire room, walking along each wall, examining every tiny speck. Finally he crossed toward the hidden doors, pushed back the curtains, and removed a key on a gold chain from his vest pocket. He slipped the key into the door’s tiny lock.
Van’s heart drummed.
The paneled doors swung open. “After you,” said Mr. Falborg.
Van ventured through the doors. Mr. Falborg stepped in too, closing the doors behind them.
The Collectors Page 9