by Henry Clark
“Right!” said Freak, giving a basketball he had found in the aisle an enormous bounce and catching it as it ricocheted off the ceiling. “If that’s what we’re doing, I’ll run over to the house and get the crayon.”
“While you’re doing that,” Fiona announced, “I’m changing my clothes.”
The bus let us off and Freak and Fiona headed across the field toward Bagshot Road. I stopped by the sofa.
It had rained briefly during the afternoon. The leaves on the ground were wet and shiny, but the sofa, I was somehow not surprised to see, was completely dry.
I stretched out on it and stared into the overhead tree branches. An escaped party balloon fluttered on a twig near the top of one of the trees. As I sank comfortably into the cushions, I closed my eyes. The sun filtering through the tree branches caused odd, yet surprisingly clear, shapes to appear on the insides of my eyelids. I saw four rectangles arranged like windowpanes, two panes above the others. The upper right pane pulsed twice with wavering sunlight. Then the upper left pulsed once and the right pulsed twice again.
It was hypnotic. After the third or fourth repetition, I felt myself drifting into sleep.
And I dreamed.
I knew I was dreaming because I was walking along Breeland Road toward the bus stop, but when I got there, the pavement ended in a clearing where the bus stop should have been. I stepped into the clearing and was suddenly on the top of a hill. I could see land stretching out in all directions, full of forests and lakes and villages. In the distance, where the horizon should have been, the land curved upward. It curved upward and made a dome over my head. I looked straight up, through patchy clouds, and I could still see land. The overhead land was very far away. I thought I could make out continents and oceans. It was like I was in a planetarium, only instead of projecting stars on the ceiling, somebody was projecting a map.
“It’s not to scale, of course,” said a voice behind me.
I turned and found Mr. Hendricks, my English teacher, standing behind me. He was wearing a suit made from the same material the sofa was upholstered with. It made him look like a giant leprechaun.
“You’d need a telescope to see this much detail, if you were actually there,” he added.
“Actually where?”
“Indorsia.”
“Is that a vocabulary word?”
“It is for you. I hasten to add I am not really your English teacher. Mr. Hendricks is currently in his apartment reading a trashy detective novel with the shades drawn. I am taking his form because you seem to like him and I wanted to appear to you as someone familiar.”
“Thanks. That’s not really something someone would say in a dream.”
“Possibly not. Then again, you’re dreaming, so maybe it is.”
“What is Indorsia?”
“This place.” The person who wasn’t Mr. Hendricks gestured at the landscape around us.
“It looks like it’s on the inside surface of a giant, hollow sphere,” I said. “It’s probably the inside of the basketball Freak was playing with on the bus. That’s how my dreams work. I put in things from right before I fell asleep. If I’m eating pretzels while watching a monster movie on TV and I doze off—”
“You dream about a monster eating pretzels?”
“I dream about pretzels eating a monster. I’m a little messed up.”
“You may think of Indorsia as being on the inside surface of a basketball if you wish. The analogy is not a bad one.”
“And you’re probably supposed to be the sofa. You’re upholstered the same way.”
“It would be more accurate to say I am the sofa’s spokesperson. The sofa is a wonderful example of smart furniture. Smart furniture is all the rage among upper-class Indorsians. It keeps itself clean; it digests stains; it can change its color to match the drapes. It grows from cubes no bigger than this.”
He held out his hand. Something resembling a sugar cube sat in the center of his outstretched palm. The cube was the same green as his suit.
I was used to people talking crazy in my dreams. I knew enough to humor him before he turned into a forty-foot-tall Morgue MacKenzie.
“Furniture grows from tiny cubes, huh? That’s… terrific.”
“It saves a bundle in shipping costs. It also makes it easier to pack if you’re being pursued by storm troopers.”
“Good point,” I agreed, glancing around for possible escape routes.
“It took about a year for the sofa to grow to full size. The nannies replicated themselves and constructed it according to a standard template. This particular sofa is unique in that it has nanotech factories in both armrests. The nannies there can manufacture small items, once they’ve been given a sample. Handy if you need spare change.”
“Nannies?” I looked up, half expecting to see Mary Poppins out parasailing.
“Very tiny machines. So tiny, they could float through your bloodstream without your being aware of it.”
“Sounds… ticklish.”
“The most interesting thing about this sofa is its ability to tesser.”
“It grows hair?”
“It can fold space. It can teleport. It has a maximum range of two miles, and it has to recharge between transits, but it figured out how to do this all on its own. It is the only entity in either world that can do it.”
“Tesser?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that a word from a children’s book?”
“Yes. And robot is a word from a stage play. New words have to come from somewhere.”
“Then, if you ask me, this whole dream is getting hyperdiculous.”
“I don’t hold out too much hope for hyperdiculous. I don’t see it coming into common usage. It’s not frabjous enough.”
“I’m going to wake myself up now.”
I pinched my forearm and winced. Nothing changed.
“I’m sorry, but you have to stay asleep for another twelve seconds. We haven’t quite finished the neural mapping. Wouldn’t you like to know where the sofa gets the energy it needs to tesser, and to manufacture small objects, and to think?”
“No,” I said.
“I will tell you anyway.” He gave his watch a quick glance. Then he leaned in close, looked from side to side as if he were afraid of being overheard, and whispered, “Dust bunnies!”
Fiona woke me up. She poked me in the arm until I opened my eyes. As she leaned over me, I noticed that her hair was wet from a quick shower. Even though she had run a comb through it, it still looked stringy. She was wearing pants with an orange checked pattern and a purple sweatshirt that was a little damp around the collar.
“How can you possibly sleep at a time like this?” she asked. “What were you dreaming? Your eyelids were fluttering a mile a minute. That’s a sure sign of REM sleep. Rapid Eye Movement. That’s when dreams happen.”
“Not to be confused with RMM sleep,” said Freak, leaning in beside her.
“What’s that?” demanded Fiona.
“The kind of sleep I assume you have,” said Freak. “Rapid Mouth Movement.”
It doesn’t take much to distract Fiona. Being angry with Freak usually does it. She stopped wondering what I had been dreaming and turned to argue with him. I tuned the both of them out.
I sat and looked up and down the length of the sofa. I remembered that my aunt Bernie had been complaining about dust bunnies the day before. Dust bunnies, she’d said, were clumps of hair and dust that collected under furniture. I found it reassuring to be able to trace at least part of the dream back to its source. The dust bunnies. The basketball. The sofa itself.
I thought about how things from our waking lives sometimes manage to show up in our dreams. I was sometimes able to trick myself into dreaming about my parents by looking at photos of them before I went to sleep. They had died before I was two, so I had never had a real chance to know them. In my dreams, we were always going places together. In the best dream I had ever had of them, we went on a picnic.
> I suddenly realized I was gripping the edges of the cushion I was sitting on very tightly. As I started to let go, I thought I felt the cushion squeeze back. I got off the sofa as quickly as I could.
“I dreamed the sofa showed me how it was made!” I blurted out, interrupting my friends’ argument. “Mr. Hendricks was there. Only it wasn’t Mr. Hendricks; it was the sofa.”
Fiona stopped waving her finger in Freak’s face. They both turned and stared at me.
“Mr. Hendricks was the sofa?” said Freak.
“It’s that stupid velour jacket he wore yesterday,” said Fiona, immediately knowing more about my dream than I did.
“There are nanotech factories in the armrests and I was in this place where people live on the inside instead of the outside, and the sofa can tesser.” I noticed the blank looks on my friends’ faces. “I’m not explaining this well, am I?”
“Were there purple unicorns?” inquired Freak.
“No. What? Should there have been? It seemed so real.”
“Most dreams do, you know,” said Fiona, not unkindly.
“Can we get on with this?” Freak nodded toward the Underhill place. He was holding a cigar box. I assumed he had the crayon in it, along with maybe the coin, the domino, and possibly the plaid sock. Freak confirmed this, adding that the box also contained the crushed peanut shell. He said that anything that was Alf’s should, absolutely, be returned to Alf.
We walked to the gate.
“Hello?” I said.
The hinged door in the gatepost flipped down.
“You’re late,” said Alf.
“Some of us had to freshen up,” I explained. “How do we do this?”
“In a moment, I will open the gate. But there are some rules. When you walk up the drive, stay to the right. This will keep you under the trees. If, at any time, you look up and you can see open sky directly above you, you will have to turn around and leave and we will have to reschedule. Stay under the cover of the trees at all times. Do not come to the main door of the house. There is a servants’ entrance on the side. You will be able to reach this door without breaking cover. The key is under the mat. Wipe your feet and let yourselves in.”
“You think somebody is watching from above?” I asked.
“Somebody is always watching from above. Step back from the gate, please.”
The sound of turning gears came from within the gatepost. The gate shook and then slid sideways to the right. It stopped when it had opened wide enough to allow us through single file.
Freak went first and I followed Fiona.
The gate clanged shut behind us.
CHAPTER
06
Reunited Socks
Going up the driveway, I occasionally looked up through the oak trees along the side to see if I could spot any of the pterodactyls or UFOs or whatever it was Alf was worried about. I saw nothing.
The house was big and boxy with castle-like turrets on three of the four corners. It looked old enough for George Washington to have slept in, assuming George was capable of dozing off in a place that looked like it might be infested with zombies.
We found the servants’ entrance on the south side of the house. Freak retrieved the key from under the mat, fit it into the lock of the windowless metal door, and pushed cautiously inward.
We peered into the gloom beyond the doorway. A small room contained a table and three mismatched chairs. In the far wall were two stairways, one leading up, the other leading down.
“I would leave the door open,” admitted Freak.
“I had no plans to close it,” I agreed.
“Here’s a note,” said Fiona, who had stepped in and picked up a piece of paper she found on the table.
UP. DOWN THE CORRIDOR TO THE LEFT. SECOND DOOR ON THE RIGHT.
“Is he kidding? Why didn’t he just meet us here?” Freak complained.
“Maybe he’s in a wheelchair,” said Fiona.
“Having had both legs cut off in the duel that damaged the sofa,” I suggested.
There was a rumble from the downward-leading stairway, like maybe a furnace had just started up or a small dinosaur was having a bowel movement. We looked at one another and scurried up the other stairway.
We found ourselves in a long corridor lit by a single lightbulb and went left, just as the note had instructed. On our right we passed a metal circuit-breaker box and then a door. Freak started to walk past the door and I said, “Wait.”
“What?”
“The note said the second door.”
“Yeah. So? This is the first door.”
“Not if you count the door on the metal box.”
“Why,” said Fiona, through gritted teeth, “would you count the door on the metal box? It’s tiny. You can’t walk through it.”
“But it’s a door,” I said. They both looked at me. “Maybe it’s a test.”
“A test of what?”
“How well we can count?”
Freak shrugged. He knocked on the door. When nobody answered, he tried the knob.
“It’s locked. This isn’t the door.”
“Wait,” I said again. My guts twisted up the way they sometimes did during the scarier parts of monster movies.
It was an old-fashioned door, solid looking, made of four wooden panels, two on top, two on the bottom. I realized it looked like the windowpane pattern I had seen on the underside of my eyelids when I’d been lying on the sofa. The panes had pulsed. I tried to remember the pattern.
I tapped the door’s upper right panel twice. Then I tapped the left panel once. Then I tapped the right two more times. The door latch clicked and the door swung open an inch. Light streamed through the gap.
“How did you do that?” asked Freak.
I shrugged. “I followed a pattern I saw in my head when I was lying on the sofa,” I said.
“You had a vision,” Fiona said flatly.
“I guess.”
Freak pushed the door open. We followed him through it.
It was the hideout of a serial killer. At least, it looked like the kind of room the cops always found on TV shows when they were hunting a dangerous lunatic. Bulletin boards hung on the walls, and the boards were covered with articles clipped from newspapers and magazines, handwritten notes, and photographs. Pieces of yarn secured with thumbtacks connected one thing to another, sometimes stretching halfway across a wall. It could also have been, I realized, the room of a detective who was working hard to solve a case.
A map of Hellsboro with the Rodmore Chemical plant at its center was pinned up next to photographs of different breeds of dogs. A picture of a black helicopter shared space with a map of downtown Cheshire and a magazine ad for Agra Nation® brand mac and cheese. One whole bulletin board was devoted to pictures of people I didn’t recognize.
A diagram of what might have been a basketball sliced in half was stuck up next to a poster-size photo looking down into a valley from way up on the side of a mountain. The photo was so sharp and clear that Fiona, who has no head for heights, could only glance at it and look away. The valley had a lake in it that formed the perfect outline of an elephant.
“Where on earth is that?” said Freak.
“Maybe it’s not on earth,” I murmured, managing to make myself feel even more creeped out than I already did.
Everywhere there were notes on index cards in a crabbed, hurried handwriting.
THE WAY TO INDORSIA MUST BE KEPT CLOSED!
PRIMORDIAL SOUP IN REVIVARIUM TOO SALTY. REDUCE SODIUM.
USE KIDS! BOYS HAVE NO PHONES. GIRL MAY BE MATCH FOR MIRANDA.
PEANUT BUTTER MISSING FROM LAST ORDER. SPEAK TO DELIVERY MAN.
“What does it mean,” asked Fiona suspiciously, “ ‘USE KIDS’?”
“Maybe these kids here,” said Freak, tapping a photograph. It showed the three of us waiting at the bus stop.
“That does it!” said Fiona, snatching the photo from the wall. “We should get out of here right now! You guys have no phon
es. I could be a match for Miranda!”
“Only if Miranda is a nutcase,” said Freak. “That note may have nothing to do with us. I mean, who’s Miranda?”
“Maybe Alf’s looking for a babysitter,” I suggested.
“HE PHOTOGRAPHED US!”
“He also photographed squirrels and birds and passing cars,” I said, pointing to a series of similar photos. “They look like they’re all from the camera in the gatepost. It’s a security camera. He’s worried about things near the entrance to his property. That’s all.”
“Oh,” said Fiona, starting to calm down. “Well. Maybe.”
She turned. Then she jumped like she had just seen a snake.
Freak and I turned, and we jumped with her.
The sofa was behind us.
It was right next to the door. I didn’t see how we could have missed it when we came in.
“No, no, no, no,” said Freak, shaking his head and sounding less confident than he usually did. “That’s NOT the same sofa. There’s no stain on the cushion and there’s no cut along the back. It’s another sofa from the same set of furniture.”
I pointed.
A wet maple leaf clung to one of the sofa’s dragon-claw feet.
“My dream was right,” I said. “I was told the sofa can tesser. Which, in case you didn’t know, means it can move around on its own.”
“NO, IT CAN’T!” Freak grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around so we were looking at each other eye-to-eye. “You have to turn off this imagination of yours SOMETIME, River Man! It’s a sofa. It stays wherever it’s put. Our sofa is still out by the road. This is a different sofa.”
“Sure,” I agreed, trying to pacify him. “Maybe Alf got them at a two-for-one sale.”
“This isn’t the right room,” muttered Fiona. “We’re not supposed to be here.”
“He’s going to wonder what’s taking us so long,” I said.
“Do we actually still want to meet him, after seeing this?” asked Fiona. “This has nutzoid written all over it.”
“Actually, the word I keep seeing is Indorsia,” I said, pointing to another hand-scribbled note. This one read,