They crouched amid overhanging fuchsia and looked out at the street. There was MacWilt’s tavern; only it wasn’t MacWilt’s any more. It was called Hoover’s now and there was a wooden sign hanging in front of it depicting a soup pot and an ale glass. Across the street at the inn three boys were playing on the balcony, dropping paper helicopters onto the heads of fishermen below. Even as Jack and Skeezix watched, the innkeeper poked his head out of an open window beside the nailed-shut door and ordered the boys off the balcony before he ‘threw them off.
Jack grinned at Skeezix and retied his belt. Some things hadn’t changed, although heaven knew who the boys were. When the three had clambered down the drainpipe and disappeared under the dock, Skeezix and Jack scurried across the road and into the weedy flower bed of Potts’s bakery. The smell of sugared doughnuts staggered Skeezix. He clutched at his heart and groaned, then blinked in genuine surprise at the sign over the door. SKEEZIX’S BAKERY, it Said. BAKED GOODS – ALL KINDS.
‘This is cruel,’ said Skeezix. ‘Land of dreams! I’ll –’
‘Ssh, look,’ said Jack. ‘Isn’t that Elaine Potts inside, rolling dough?’
Skeezix smiled a moony sort of smile and nodded his head. ‘She’s a vision, isn’t she? Big though, under the circumstances. I want one of those doughnuts. Good old Elaine. She’ll see to it that I get one. She always has before, hasn’t she?! I think she’s in love with me.’
‘She’s not in love with a Skeezix who isn’t as tall as her ankle, moron. She’d scream if she saw us, depend on it. And you’d just get sick, eating a doughnut like that. Remember when she smuggled you out a dozen glazed and you ate them all? Wait!’
‘For what? I’m going in there after a doughnut, after Elaine, too, I’ll –’
‘Shut up!’ Jack poked Skeezix in the ribs and pointed. There, creeping along in the shadow of a fence two houses down and leaning heavily on his stick, was a rat-sized Dr Brown – Algernon Harbin – dressed in rags and looking like a storybook goblin. Jack and Skeezix sprinted after him, peering around the corner of the house in time to see him slip through the hinged panel of a cat door, cut in the bottom three clapboards of the side wall, just above the rear stoop.
13
JACK PEERED UNDER the door, squinting into the dim interior of a vast kitchen. Harbin wasn’t in sight, although he might easily have slipped in behind the icebox or into the pantry or even be crouching behind one of the flared legs of the stove. They should have followed him straightaway, instead of waiting. Skeezix pushed Jack a bit and frowned, caught up in the spirit of adventure. Both boys were inside in an instant, running across a wooden floor that seemed to them like a playing field and listening sharp for the arrival of the creature that the cat door was intended for. As he ran, Jack couldn’t help but wonder what, exactly, they were doing. What was Harbin doing, for that matter, skulking in through a cat door like that? Something connected to their own time, no doubt, to their own Rio Dell. Jack realised that he was following that connection more than anything else, as if it were a road that linked the two worlds, the two times. Who knew where it might lead them?
Half hidden behind a kitchen stool, Jack decided immediately that he liked whoever they were who owned the house. They seemed to have the right sort of inclinations. There were elements that he would change, if it were his, but all in all he felt a sort of affinity to it, as if he was welcome there. The kitchen walls, angling away overhead, were painted cheerfully white, with a stencilled border in red milk paint along the ceiling, the stencils having been cut in the shapes of comical cats that were easily as big as Jack and Skeezix stacked atop one another.
The cats made Jack think of Helen, who would have approved of such things, and who had once sketched a cat on a flour sack and given it to Jack to carry his stuff in. The sack was filled with marbles and bottle glass and Chinese jacks and sat right now beneath his bed in the barn loft. Or at least he hoped it did. He wasn’t entirely sure, when he thought about it, where the barn loft had got to. But thinking about it – the loft and the flour sack and Helen – only made him feel sorry for himself. So he forced himself to think about where he was and what he was doing instead, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been, since he had no idea about either.
A pot big enough for them to swim in bubbled away on the stove top, smelling good enough to give Skeezix trouble. Voices sounded in an adjacent room – laughter and the clink of glasses, the abrupt sound of someone quoting poetry that dissolved into more laughter.
On beyond the kitchen, vastly distant, stretched another room, shadowed and dim. Jack could see only that it was lined with books that shared shelves with alchemical debris and clutched bundles of dried herbs. A fierce-looking bust peered down out of the room, half lit by the sun through the kitchen window, bearded and grimacing and with a crack running down its forehead as if slammed with a hatchet. Part of the bearded jaw seemed to have been broken away. The room reminded him of Dr Jensen’s surgery and was just the sort of place he’d like to snoop around in, if he weren’t thumb-sized.
Just next to the stool they hid behind stood a wooden pantry, its door barely ajar. Jack and Skeezix reached up together and leaned into it, pushing it open farther, ready to confront Algernon Harbin if the villain were hiding within. He couldn’t be up to any good in a cheerful house like this. He was out of his element. The pantry was empty; no one was hidden behind the half dozen enormous Mason jars and the stack of baskets, big as beds. On the floor of the pantry was a flat, open tin of biscuits. Skeezix grappled one out and held it with both hands, working up courage to take a bite. But it smelled awfully of fish and was coarse and grainy and obviously meant for the cat, so he dropped it back into the tin and shrugged.
They left the pantry cabinet open just in case and stepped across to a swinging door that led out toward the talking and laughter. Hiding behind it and peering through the crack between the door and the jamb, they saw four people: three men and a woman. A bearded man stood near the door and partly hidden by it, pulling out one and then another of what must have been a thousand books in a bookcase that covered the wall. He wore a ring on his right hand, a curious band of interlacing gold like ocean waves breaking over and under each other in a line.
‘Imagine getting hold of a ring like that,’ whispered Skeezix, ‘and bringing it back home and selling it. Either one of us could wear it as a crown.’
Jack nodded, only half listening.
‘And look at that over there!’ Skeezix nodded toward the distant top of the kitchen counter, where a loaf of bread sat atop a cutting board pulled from its recess beneath the countertop. The top of the bread had been torn off, and the fluffy white interior lay exposed, peaked and white like snow-covered ragged hills. ‘A man could live in a loaf of bread that size. He could chew through it and build rooms, and when it went stale and hard he’d have a house.’
Jack still squinted out past the door. He hadn’t any interest, at the moment, in houses made of stale bread. Across the room sat a grey-haired, pleasant-looking man in glasses, his face half hidden behind a book – poetry, no doubt. He obviously had one eye on the activities of another man, roughly the same age – or so the back of his head seemed to suggest – who sat opposite him, studying the pieces of a chessboard and smoking a pipe.
In a chair by the window sat a comparatively young woman with raven-dark hair. She might have been Helen’s mother, had Helen’s mother been more beautiful even than Helen herself. She sat in profile, looking out through the sunlit window into a backyard planted in roses, and gestured to another woman – the wife, perhaps, of one of the chess players – who was clipping off roses and holding them up for inspection.
For a moment Jack considered stepping out into the open and announcing his presence, like Tom Thumb, with a bow and a flourish of his hat. Only he had no hat and he looked like a fool in his doll costume. And almost as soon as he thought about it he heard the swish of the cat door and turned to see an enormous grey tom stride through, sniffing
the air and twitching his tail like a predatory saurian. There was no place to run except out among the giants, but if he and Skeezix broke for it, the cat would pounce on them long before anyone understood the meaning of the melee and could put an end to it. Likely enough the giants would think they were mice anyway and let the cat have them.
The beast stopped, cocked its head, and leapt into the open pantry, intent on the fish biscuits. Skeezix was quicker than Jack. He dashed across, headlong into the half-open pantry door, trying to push it shut and trap the beast inside. The door wouldn’t budge; it was too heavy for him. Jack threw himself against it too; it was no time to be timid. The cat, thank goodness, didn’t seem to care. As the door clicked shut there was the sound of crunching biscuits from within, as if he’d settled in to take advantage of the open tin while he had a chance.
Skeezix immediately set out to climb up onto the first of a series of copper pulls that ran along the fronts of a half dozen kitchen drawers beneath the countertop. Three or four of the drawers were open slightly, which made it an easy enough thing to scramble up, though the top drawer stood open some two giant inches, like an overhanging shelf on a cliff face.
Jack was struck suddenly by the notion that a handful of bread wouldn’t be a bad idea at all, and he clambered along after Skeezix, boosting him up around the top drawer so that Skeezix could get his foot and arm into the long cut in the counter face where the breadboard would go. From there Skeezix pulled himself onto the sidewalk-wide edge of the open drawer and from there onto the counter, leaning over to give Jack a hand up after him.
Jack looked back, down toward the floor, and nearly toppled over at the sight of it. He edged away across the marble countertop, which was pale gold and veined with swirls of green that were creviced with fissures into which had fallen years worth of crumbs and gunk. It was an appalling sight, all in all, although a giant wouldn’t have noticed. And a giant, probably, wouldn’t have seen the grey-white powder that dusted the marble, either. It smelled musty and sharp – faintly like rat poison. A really clean kitchen would require a mouse-sized inspector.
Skeezix had made his way over to the bread and had torn out two handfuls of the coarse white fluff. He stuffed a morsel into his mouth and shrugged at Jack, as if to say it wasn’t at all bad, taken all the way around. Steam rose beyond him, from the pot on the low stove. The cat, suddenly, yowled and scratched against the door. Surely the giants would hear it, and they’d come to let it out. Giant cats, Jack reminded himself, could easily leap up onto giant counters.
He looked around him. There wouldn’t be time to climb down the drawers again if the cat got out and took a fancy to them. Maybe they could hide in the sink drain. The double-hung kitchen window stood opened and unscreened above him, beyond towering canisters. Jack left Skeezix to the bread for the moment and climbed up onto the sill, brushing shoulders with a half dozen pairs of salt and pepper shakers – comical dogs and pigs and egg-headed men – that stood clustered on either side of the window on the flat sill. He held onto the weighted rope that ran along inside the window frame and looked out. There was a ledge beyond, and a window box planted with begonias, the prickly leaves broad as bed sheets. It wouldn’t be an impossible thing, if it came to it, for them to go out through the window, onto the ledge, and down into the shrubs beyond.
In the meantime, he’d eat bread. He was suddenly famished. Heaven knew how long it had been since he’d eaten at Dr Jensen’s – or how long it had been since he’d slept. Journeying through magical lands was adventuresome, surely, but he needed a destination of some sort, a purpose; otherwise he might as well be bumming around his own world. At least there he wouldn’t have to flee in terror from kitty-cats.
He stared for a moment from his perch among the saltshakers. Beyond Skeezix and the loaf of bread, where the edge of the counter loomed above the stove, half obscured by steam, lay an upended box. He’d seen such a box before, in Willoughby’s kitchen; it was a common enough sight – rat poison, sitting on its side and with a fork shoved under the end of it, as if someone had used the fork to lever the bottom up. It was curious, surely. Someone had dumped it into the soup pot or stew pot or whatever it was, still bubbling merrily while the giants chatted and laughed in the other room. Someone had poisoned the soup.
Jack knew who it was. He had no idea on earth why, unless it was simply out of general villainy, nor had he any notion why Harbin had left the upended box in plain sight. It must have been rough, heavy as the box would have been to a mouse-sized man, to push it out of a cupboard and onto the counter and then drag it to the edge and over the soup pot. Certainly hiding the emptied box and the fork he’d used as a lever would have been an infinitely easier task.
Jack looked around him suspiciously. Then, in alarm, he leapt down and rushed toward Skeezix, slapping the bread out of his friend’s hands. ‘Poison!’ he whispered.
‘What?’
Jack hauled him around the bread loaf, where they both stood staring at the box. They walked to the edge of the counter, shading their faces from the swirling steam, and peered over. Right below was the bubbling pot, the grainy poison dissolved in the soup. A brief scrape and clink sounded above. Jack looked up, cursing himself for his stupidity, and threw himself into Skeezix as a crockery saucer slid out of a newly opened cupboard and sailed down at their heads. The saucer fell sideways, whumping into the bread loaf, sliding down with a whirling clatter onto the countertop, knocking both of them over and settling across Skeezix’s legs. Jack prayed that the noise of it would attract the giants, who were laughing aloud again over their chess game.
Algernon Harbin peered down at them from above, grinning maliciously. He’d started to grow. He’d been back longer than they, perhaps by hours, and he was twice their height – rat-sized now, big enough to tackle the boxful of poison, to climb up into the cupboard and hide himself there. They’d interrupted his meddling with the soup when they’d come in through the cat door. He would have hidden the box, and the unsuspecting giants would have eaten the soup.
Harbin held his stick out in front of him and leapt, his rag clothes ballooning out around him, straight into the centre of the bread. He climbed off, advised them sarcastically to wait a moment, and hurriedly limped down to the open drawer lowering himself into it.
Jack wasn’t in a mood to wait. He helped Skeezix from under the saucer and sprinted toward the open window. If the giants wanted to sing comic songs while their soup was poisoned, that was their lookout. He and Skeezix weren’t part of it. They could shove a message under the front door -later, after they’d got away.
Harbin loomed up out of the drawer with a poultry skewer in his hand, a skewer that would have knitted shut a turkey big as an elephant. He climbed onto the countertop and in three steps cut them off from the open window, jabbing the skewer at Skeezix’s head with a viciousness that appalled Jack. Both boys swerved back toward the canisters, leaping along, grateful for Harbin’s limp. Jack reached them first, sliding in behind the fat glass jars. Skeezix followed. Either Harbin would squeeze in after them -and he was almost too big for that now – or he’d go round to the other side and cut off their escape. They wouldn’t be able to see him easily beyond the flour-fogged glass and the mounded sugar; but then, he wouldn’t be able to see them either.
They waited, halfway between the flour and the oatmeal, breathing heavily, wondering which way to run. Harbin was nowhere to be seen. Jack took a tentative step back out, and suddenly Harbin was there, leaning around the sugar canister and stabbing at him with the skewer, held in both hands. Jack dropped, scuttling back into the shadows of the canisters like a crab. The sugar jar thunked abruptly against the wall, trapping them there. Harbin appeared beyond the last, almost empty rice canister, casting a little trifling wave at them as he shoved that one against the wall too, so that Jack and Skeezix stood in a little prison, bounded on all sides by the canisters and by the wall. They could see Harbin through the glass now, limping along toward the stove.
He whacked the sides of the box of rat poison, shaking out every fragment, then got round behind it and shoved it along the marble, back past the canisters, tilting it off the edge and into the open drawer. He clambered in after it and was gone for a moment, no doubt sliding it into the recesses. Then he was out again, strolling toward them across the countertop as if he had all the time in the world. Still the giants laughed and joked and sang, as if they’d been at it for hours and were only half done. The cat, trapped in the pantry, kept up a sort of yowling accompaniment.
‘Hey,’ said Skeezix. ‘Look!’ He’d got his knee in behind the rice canister and inched the heavy glass jar away from the wall. Jack pushed in beside him and shoved. The canister slid away, and Skeezix was past it, running. Jack followed, straight toward the fork. Jack heard Harbin curse. Something struck him on the shoulder – the skewer, thrown like a spear but flying up endwise and glancing off, then sliding away across the slick marble and onto the floor behind the stove.
Skeezix and Jack picked up the fork together. It was heavy but secure as a battering ram with one of them on either end. They rushed back at Harbin, who fled toward his drawer, faster than they were despite his limp. He tumbled headfirst into it, ducking back out of sight. They stood on the edge, waiting for him to show himself, but there was nothing they could do with the fork if he did appear except drop it on him. They couldn’t thrust it downward and both still hold onto it. It was time, perhaps, to leave, while they could still hold the villain at bay.
They backed off toward the window, a step at a time. Jack stepped into a crevice in the marble, fell over backward, and let go of his end of the fork, which clanked down onto the countertop and bounced. Skeezix was dragged over with it, shouting and kicking, and Harbin was up and out of the drawer, hauling a tin tea strainer behind him on a chain. He stood up, glaring at Skeezix, and whirled the strainer around his head as if it were a bull-roarer. Skeezix seemed to pause, halfway to his feet, as if wondering whether there was anything in a whirling tea strainer that would give him real trouble. The grimace on Harbin’s face seemed to decide him, and he was up, running for the windowsill, where Jack stood ready to help him up.
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