The Secret Box

by Whitaker Ringwald

  “We went into your house,” Tyler explained. “The door was open. The place had been ransacked.”

  “Martha and George broke in while I was taking a walk. When I confronted them, Martha knocked me in the head and I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in a strange place.” She continued to scratch the cut on her arm. “We were working together on the island of Kassos. I’m the one who excavated Pyrrha’s jar. I didn’t know what it was so I opened it. And hope was sucked from everyone at the site, including George and Martha.”

  “How come you weren’t affected?” I asked.

  “The only thing I can figure is that whoever holds the jar is immune. The jar needs a protector. The protector does not suffer.” She looked at me. “The jar was originally made for a girl, for Pyrrha, but Pyrrha is long gone. So the jar continues to seek a female to protect it. Females appear to be the only ones who can feel it calling. Can you feel it right now, Jax?”

  “Yes,” I said. Pulling at me. Hold me. Keep me safe. I fought the sensation and jumped to my feet as I realized what was at stake. “Why would you send a hope-sucking jar to me? Holy cow! What if I’d opened it? My mom, my cousins, they could have been hurt.”

  “If they’d been standing near you when you opened the jar, then they would have felt god-awful and they would have looked like zombies, but the effects aren’t permanent. Everyone at the site eventually recovered.” She ran a finger along her forearm, staring intently at the wound. “But they only recovered because I closed the jar. If it had been left open, I dread to think what would have happened.”

  My stomach clenched and a wave of panic rolled over me. My mind filled with an image of my mom, lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position. If I’d opened the jar . . . “Hello?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You sent it to me? To me? What if I’d left it open? I could have created some sort of—”

  “Zombie apocalypse,” Tyler said, practically shouting with excitement. The man who was fishing turned and looked at him. “Totally cool! I’ve been waiting for the zombie apocalypse.”

  Tyler wasn’t taking this seriously. Ethan said nothing. He just sat there with a giant scowl on his face, disbelieving the entire thing. Juniper looked sorrowfully into my eyes. “I’m sorry, Jax. I didn’t plan to send it to you, but I was desperate. Martha Camel figured it out. She knew such a jar could bring great power and wealth. People without hope are easy to control. So she and her husband pursued me. I paid a huge price to have my identity erased and I moved from city to city, trying to keep a low profile. My whole life became dedicated to two things—trying to keep away from the Camels, and trying to destroy the jar. I’d been living in New Hope for only a few weeks when they found me. There was no doubt in my mind that they’d break into the house and do whatever they needed to do to get their hands on the jar. So I panicked. I put it into the puzzle box and mailed it to you. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I’m afraid. The jar makes your thoughts a bit clouded.”

  Yes, it did. How could I judge her? If the jar continued to work its magic on me, what might I do to keep it safe? How many lives might I risk?

  “My desire was to protect it, not to endanger you.” Her eyes welled with tears again. “I never meant to hurt you or your family.” She wiped her face with the bandana, then slowly rose to her feet. “I shall take Pyrrha’s jar and be on my way. There is no need to endanger you any further.”

  With a burst, Ethan darted to his feet. “Uh . . . guys, we have a problem.” We all turned.

  The Camels were heading our way.

  26

  Ethan

  FACT: There are over 24 million people in the world who have some form of dementia. I was beginning to think our great-aunt was one of those people.

  In order for me to believe any part of her crazy story, I’d have to switch brains with Tyler. Only then could I accept a reality in which a pantheon of Greek gods once ruled the world. Give me a break. A jar that craves hope and sucks it out of people?

  And yet I couldn’t ignore another fact—so much of her story made sense, in a weird and very unscientific way.

  “How’d they find us?” Jax whispered. The Camels were standing way across the park, huddling over something Mr. Camel was holding. They hadn’t spotted us. Yet.

  “Follow me,” Tyler said. He slung the backpack over his shoulder, then dashed toward a bike-rental stand. Jax and I held on to Juniper, trying to move her as quickly as possible. Old people have brittle bones, at least that’s what I’ve read, so I tried not to squeeze too hard. As we stumbled after Tyler, I kept glancing over my shoulder. The Camels were focused on some sort of device. Was it a phone? We reached the stand and hid behind it, out of view of the Camels. But it didn’t make me feel much better that the only thing separating us from Mr. Camel’s gun was a thin wall of plywood. Tyler peered around the corner. “I see them. I think they’ve got a GPS unit.”

  Juniper groaned. “I was worried they might.” She touched the wound on her forearm. “It would appear that when they knocked me out, they inserted a tracking device in my arm. I won’t be able to evade them until the device is removed.”

  Jax gulped. “Removed?”

  “Do you have a knife?”

  I reached into my pocket. “I’ve got one. A Swiss army knife.” But it wasn’t there. Had I left it in the motel room, along with my baseball cap? “I don’t have it.”

  “I do,” Jax said. She unzipped a side pocket on the backpack and took out the knife. She didn’t explain why she’d taken my knife, but I guessed it had something to do with the weird way she’d been acting.

  The bike-rental guy paid no attention to us. He was busy with customers. A couple of teenagers who couldn’t stop kissing were renting a tandem bike. And a family with a baby was checking out a tow-along contraption that looked like a tent on wheels.

  Juniper rolled up her right sleeve. “The wound hasn’t scabbed yet. It should be easy to cut out the transmitter.” She took the knife and opened it to the sharpest blade.

  “Uh . . . wait. The knife’s not sterile,” I told her. “You could get an infection.”

  “An infection is the least of my worries,” she said. “I can’t take the jar to a safe place if the Camels can track me.” Her hand trembled as she pushed the blade against her skin.

  “Ugh,” Jax said, turning away. I knew what she was thinking. It wasn’t the thought of piercing the skin, it was the thought of the blood that would leak out.

  Juniper sighed. “I . . . I can’t do it. I’m right-handed.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. No problem. I’d cut a frog open in biology class. I’d gutted a fish. I could slice open my great-aunt’s arm. Why not? Nothing else about this day had been normal.

  “No.” Jax grabbed the knife. “I want to do this.”

  Even Tyler was surprised. “You want to do it? But you hate blood.”

  She held the knife tightly. “You guys have done everything—the driving, the directions, you rescued the box from the safe, you stood up to Mrs. Camel. I need to do something. This is important.” She gritted her teeth. We closed in around Juniper, hiding her from passersby who might wonder what was going on. As she shut her eyes and gripped my arm for support, Jax pierced the little cut with the tip of the blade. Then, using the knife’s tweezers, she pulled out a tiny plastic object, thin and square. It came out easily and there wasn’t much blood. “I did it,” she said, nearly breathless. She looked at me, smiling with pride. “Did you see that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That was amazing.” She’d faced one of her biggest fears. I would have hugged her if there hadn’t been a deranged gun-toting couple looking for us.

  Juniper dabbed the wound with her bandana. “Thank you,” she said. “Now drop that in the dirt and let’s get out of here before they find us.”

  Jax dropped the transmitter. Tyler peered around the corner again. “Crud! They’re coming this way!”

  We hadn’t been fast enough. Mrs. Camel clenched her fi
sts as she powered toward us. Mr. Camel followed, fiddling in his pocket for, I’m guessing, his gun. We had to get out of there! The rental guy was busy. I didn’t have much money, but there was nothing else to do. I pulled the five dollars from my pocket and slapped it onto the counter. Then I grabbed a tandem bike. It wasn’t stealing, exactly. “Let’s go,” I said. Jax beamed at me. As usual, I could practically read her mind—borrowing the bikes was a very Jax thing to do.

  Juniper climbed onto the second seat and I began to pedal as fast as I could. Tyler and Jax grabbed another bike and we were off. “Hang on,” I told Juniper as I veered around a baby stroller. The mom shot me an angry look. I’d never ridden tandem before, so turning was tricky. As we hit a speed bump, Juniper moaned. “Sorry,” I said. A flock of pigeons and geese were gathered up ahead, eating bread crumbs that some kids were sprinkling. “Watch out!” The kids jumped out of the way. The birds squawked, and flew to safety. My heart pounded in my ears.

  “Crud! The Camels are on a bike,” Jax said as she and Tyler rode up next to me. “We should split up. That will confuse them.”

  “No! The jar must stay with me,” Juniper insisted. “Find a crowd. Then I can slip away and you children can go back home and forget any of this ever happened.”

  Only if I got Alzheimer’s would I be able to forget this day. Only then.

  “There’s a crowd,” Tyler said, pointing. A tour bus had pulled up to the curb. The door hissed open and a bunch of people started unloading. They all wore orange T-shirts that read, Number 1 Tours. Because no tourist should feel like a number 2.

  The tour group’s destination was the Jefferson Memorial, another gleaming white pantheon-style monument. Like the Lincoln Memorial, there was a colonnade and a wide stairway. This was an open-air structure and the colonnade filtered light into the memorial itself. Of course I knew lots of facts about this place, but no one cared at that moment—not even me.

  We ditched the bikes near the tour bus. I held my great-aunt’s hand, guiding her until we were in the middle of the group. Some people were taking pictures with their phones; others were complaining about what they’d had for breakfast. Jax and Tyler pushed in next to us. We walked with tiny steps as we squeezed together. I tried not to think about how close everyone was standing. I felt naked without my baseball cap. Tyler stood on tiptoe and looked around. “I don’t see them. I think we lost them.”

  “Everyone inside,” the guide announced through a megaphone. “Don’t push!”

  But everyone did push. Even if we’d wanted to escape at that point, we wouldn’t have been able to. Up the stairs we went, like fish caught in a current. Elbows pressed against me, voices rang all around. I started to get dizzy. But then we spilled between the columns and into the memorial chamber. As everyone spread out, I took a deep breath. “You okay?” Jax whispered. “I know you hate crowds.”

  “Uh . . .” I wiped sweat from my face. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  The chamber was round with a high, domed ceiling. Sunlight streamed through the front colonnade and through the four open portals that were placed around the chamber. Curved wall segments stood between these portals, covered with inscriptions from Jefferson’s most famous documents, like the Declaration of Independence. And smack-dab in the center, standing on a podium, was a bronze nineteen-foot-tall statue of our third president. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail and a cloak hung all the way to his feet. The statue was roped off, probably to keep little kids from climbing all over it.

  “You have exactly ten minutes to explore the monument on your own,” the tour guide said, his voice echoing throughout the chamber. “Then I will give a short presentation on the bus as we head to our next destination.” He walked out the front portal and down the stairs. The Number 1 tourists continued to spread out, talking among themselves and snapping photos.

  “Now’s the time,” Juniper said. She’d tied her bandana around her arm, to keep the wound from bleeding. “Give me the backpack and I’ll slip out of here. I must get the jar to a safe place.” She grabbed one of the straps.

  “I don’t think you should do this alone,” Jax said.

  I was about to tell Jax that it would be best if Juniper took the jar. Because we were just three kids from Chatham, New Jersey, and what did we know about archaeological intrigue? Our parents were expecting us to be home that night, safe in our beds, not running from monument to monument, trying to avoid being shot by Mr. Camel or kidnapped by Mrs. Camel. But that’s when Tyler said, “They found us.”

  The Camels stopped in their tracks at the front open portal, watching us. Mr. Camel’s hand was still in his pocket. Mrs. Camel glared like a lioness who had spotted her prey. A single security guard wandered the perimeter, more interested in his phone than in his job.

  “Would someone explain to me why we don’t simply call the police?” Tyler asked. “Because now is probably a real good time.”

  “We can’t let the police get their hands on the jar,” Jax said.

  “Exactly,” Juniper said. “The fewer people who know about its powers, the better.”

  I didn’t argue. The transmitter had been real. The kidnapping and thievery had been real. Whether or not the jar had actually belonged to Pyrrha, those Camels were serious about getting it. They were professional criminals. Calling the police might drive them over the edge and they might decide to attack. “So what do we do?”

  “We need a distraction,” Juniper said as we huddled at the base of Jefferson’s statue. “Something that might stall them and give me a head start. At least enough time to get to a cab.”

  “I could start crying,” Jax said. “I could pretend I broke my ankle or something. That would cause a scene.”

  “That would bring attention to you but it wouldn’t keep the Camels from following me,” Juniper said.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Tyler said. “In Cyclopsville, one of the ways to defeat the king is to trample him with a stampede of zombies. We could do the same thing here. Ethan could act as a tour guide and try to get everyone’s attention. Then he could lead the group over to the Camels and we could trip them up while Juniper makes her escape.”

  That wasn’t such a bad idea, except that it would mean talking to more people than I’d ever talked to, at least triple the size of the Lincoln Memorial group. We all looked at our great-aunt. Her breath was shallow. Perspiration glistened on the bridge of her nose. It had been a fast walk up those stairs. She wobbled, then leaned against Jax.

  “I don’t mean to be rude or anything,” Jax said, “but I don’t think you can get away quick enough. You’re tired and you’ve been hurt. We could cause the biggest distraction in the world but you still wouldn’t be able to outrun the Camels.”

  The Camels hadn’t moved, their gazes burning into us like acid. The security guard waddled past, texting something and snickering to himself.

  “What if we all split up?” Tyler said. “Went in opposite directions. They wouldn’t know who to follow.”

  “Martha would know. She can sense the jar,” Juniper said.

  I frowned. While “sensing” a jar sounded ridiculous, I couldn’t ignore the fact that Mrs. Camel was staring at the backpack, her fingers twitching.

  “Then there’s only one thing to do,” Jax said. “We have to make it so the Camels can’t follow any of us. So they can’t even move.”

  “How are we going to do that?” I wondered. But as soon as I asked that question, I knew what she was thinking.

  Jax grabbed the backpack. “We have to open the jar.”

  “No!” Juniper cried.

  “Listen to me.” Jax lowered her voice so only we could hear. She unrolled her plan like a seasoned general leading the troops. “The effects are only temporary. You said so, right?” Juniper nodded. “So I’ll take the jar out of the backpack. Ethan and Tyler will cause some sort of commotion and lead the tourists out of here and back to the bus. If you and I hold onto the jar, we’ll be safe. I’ll open it just long enough for
the Camels to turn into zombies. Then I’ll close it.”

  She looked at me. What was I supposed to say? Part of me believed her and part of me thought this whole thing was impossible. But I sure as heck didn’t have a better plan. “If we don’t deal with the Camels right now, they’ll come after us and none of us will ever be safe,” I said.

  Tyler raised an eyebrow. “Then let’s do this thing.”

  Juniper nodded. “Agreed.”

  Jax took the jar out of the backpack and removed the bubble wrap. A change came over her immediately. Her eyes flashed and she hugged it to her chest. Mrs. Camel went rigid as she spied the jar.

  “Hurry,” Juniper told us.

  “I know what to do,” Tyler said. “FIRE!” he yelled. “FIRE!”

  The security guard looked up. People stopped walking but no one panicked. We were in an open stone building with direct escapes all around us. There were no flames, no smoke. The guard slid the phone into his pocket and hurried toward us.

  I took a deep breath. Act confident and no one questions you. I cleared my throat, then stepped over the rope and up onto the podium. Thomas Jefferson towered behind me. “Hello everyone,” I said, my hands around my mouth. “May I have your attention please?” Only a few people glanced at me. “May I have your attention please?” I hollered.

  They looked up from their phones and maps. Mr. Camel narrowed his eyes with suspicion. Mrs. Camel’s attention was frozen, as if nothing else existed in the world but the jar. The security guard pointed at me. “Hey, kid, you’re not supposed to be behind the ropes.”

  I took a deep breath. Confidence. “Uh . . . hello everyone. Your ten minutes are over. Please make your way back to the bus.” No one questioned me. No one asked who I was or why I wasn’t wearing an orange shirt. The Number 1 tourists began to move toward the front exit, but not fast enough. “Uh . . . I don’t mean to alarm anyone but the bus is leaving!”

  Boy, did they move quickly. The place was deserted in a matter of seconds. Except for the guard. He halted a few feet from our backpack, which lay on the floor. “Does that belong to one of you?” he asked.