by Henry Clark
“But it wasn’t Alf who told us,” I argued. “It was Guernica. And Guernica also mentioned the flash mobs. We know those are real.”
“No, we don’t,” replied Fiona, an angry edge to her voice.
We had reached the door to the room with all the bulletin boards. Without discussing it, we had stopped in front of it.
“River and I have seen the flash mobs,” said Freak, finally backing me up. “Can you honestly tell us you don’t remember?”
“What? Singing show tunes? While waving my hands around? I wouldn’t be caught dead doing that. And don’t you think I’d remember? Every time you’ve asked, I’ve just assumed you were messing with me.”
“We showed you the newspaper article they printed after the first flash mob. If you didn’t participate, why don’t you remember seeing it happen?”
“Maybe I was in the bathroom! I missed it!”
“That’s probably what everybody thought when they read that article. They missed it, because they were in the bathroom,” I reasoned.
“That would make it a flush mob,” Freak said.
“How could I be doing it? And not know?” Fiona sounded genuinely frightened.
“Are we going in, or aren’t we?” Freak asked, ignoring her. “There has to be something in there that will prove this stuff one way or the other.”
“What if Alf catches us?” said Fiona. “He probably thinks we’re halfway home by now.”
“Alf is at the other end of the building,” said Freak.
“No, he’s not,” I said. “The way we zigged and zagged to get to it, I’m pretty sure the gallery is right overhead.”
I could tell by his expression that Freak thought so, too. I realized too late he had been trying to calm Fiona.
“Then we’ll just have to be very quiet,” he said, giving me a look. “Come on, Fiona. We’ll be fine.”
I tapped on the door panels the way I had the first time. Again, the door opened.
The sofa was no longer in the room.
“There’s your proof,” I whispered.
Freak stared at the empty space where the sofa had been. “No,” he said.
“Maybe it had to go potty,” I suggested.
“Alf moved it. He was only pretending to chase a raccoon,” Freak said, sounding far from positive.
“One man? By himself? Moving that sofa? Through that door?”
I thought it was obvious the door was too narrow for the sofa to fit through. Freak refused to believe it. He only glanced at the door, then turned his attention to the things tacked up on the walls. One whole bulletin board had newspaper clippings about the building of the Rodmore Chemical plant. Another described how a man named Leo Bagshot had built the Sunnyside housing development.
“Here’s a picture of your dad,” Fiona said to Freak. She still seemed agitated, but she was getting calmer.
Freak and I looked. It was a picture of Frank Nesterii, sitting in a golf cart in the driveway of a Sunnyside house. The house behind him looked brand new. According to the caption, Leo Bagshot had given Mr. Nesterii a bonus for selling the most Sunnyside houses.
“Yeah,” said Freak. “Then a lot of the people my father sold those houses to blamed him when the Hellsboro fire forced them to move. But why is his picture here?”
“Why is any of this here?” asked Fiona.
I pulled a yellowed newspaper clipping from one of the bulletin boards. It was a clipping I was familiar with. Very, very familiar.
The headline read:
CHESHIRE COUPLE KILLED IN CRASH
It described how John and Willow Monroe, a chemist and a geophysicist, had died eleven years earlier when their car went over an embankment as they were coming down Severance Mountain on Route 14. They had been killed instantly. Their son, River, who had been asleep in the backseat, sustained injuries to his legs. The Monroes had both gotten jobs at Rodmore Chemical eight months earlier, and had purchased a home in the Sunnyside housing tract around the same time.
I knew the clipping pretty much by heart. What interested me was the handwritten note stapled to the bottom of it:
SUPPOSITION—J AND W LEARNED OF RODMORE’S CHEMICAL DUMPING, DID NOT APPROVE, GATHERED EVIDENCE? TAKING EVIDENCE TO EPA OFFICE IN FLANDERS? BRAKE LINES TAMPERED WITH?
“What’s the EPA?” I asked.
“Environmental Protection Agency,” answered Fiona.
“What?” said Freak, studying the look on my face.
“Alf—or whoever wrote this—thinks my parents might have been deliberately murdered. To stop them from telling the EPA about Rodmore’s chemical dumping.”
I could have used the sofa right about then. Instead, I sank to the floor.
Freak scrunched down next to me and eased the clipping out of my hands. He scowled at it. Fiona scrunched down on the other side and, after an awkward moment, put her arm around me.
“So I lost my sister and you may have lost your parents because of the chemical dump,” said Freak.
“Maybe,” I said, not quite willing to believe it. I got shakily back to my feet. Being comforted by Fiona was weirder than anything else that had happened.
“Do you really think the chemicals in the ground affected the health of the people living in Sunnyside?” Fiona asked Freak.
“Alf seems to think so. And he’s certainly studied the situation.” Freak waved a hand at the walls.
“He may not have studied it enough,” said Fiona mysteriously. She traced a piece of yarn connecting an obituary for my parents to an obituary for Freak’s sister. His sister’s obit overlapped a list of other Sunnyside residents who had gotten sick. “There’s no mention of Audrey here.”
“Audrey?”
“She would have been born a minute or so after I was. I would have been the older sister.” Fiona looked at us to see if we understood. “I was supposed to be twins.”
It was the first time she had ever said anything this personal to us. Freak and I stared at her uncomfortably. I made a move to put my arm around her. She anticipated it and raised her hand.
“This was right around the time of the toxic plume. It never occurred to me there might be a connection.”
“It doesn’t look like it occurred to Alf, either,” I said.
“There were supposed to be two of you?” Freak asked.
“She would have been named after my grandmother. Audrey didn’t survive, but I came out all right. Except for my achromatopsia.”
“You don’t believe in God?”
“I’m color-blind.”
“That’s no reason not to believe in God,” Freak assured her.
“Achromatopsia means color-blindness, you idiot! I can only see things in black-and-white!”
“Oh!” said Freak. “Color-blind!” As if that explained a lot about Fiona. Which it did.
One of the bulletin boards at the far end of the room rattled against the wall, like a breeze had disturbed it. We stopped talking and stared.
“Did I mention I thought I saw an ax floating in the air the last time we were here?” I inquired.
“You think you see a lot of things,” muttered Freak as he tiptoed over to the bulletin board and motioned for me to help him. The board was hanging on a wire. We lifted the board off its hook and exposed a two-foot opening halfway up the wall. Cool air was gently flowing from it.
“It’s some sort of air vent,” guessed Freak.
“No, it’s a laundry chute,” Fiona corrected him, coming over. “It goes up to the higher floors. When the house had servants, they could dump the dirty clothes down the chute. This must have been the laundry room.”
“How do you know this?”
“British TV shows. The kind you guys never watch.”
“Shh!” I said.
We heard voices coming down the chute.
“Alf said he was alone here,” whispered Fiona.
“Maybe he’s on the phone,” I said.
“You can hear both voices equally. The other voice sound
s like a woman.”
“Maybe she’s on speakerphone.”
“Or maybe Alf lied to us about being here by himself,” said Freak.
The voices weren’t loud enough for us to make out actual words.
“If we got in the chute and stood on one another’s shoulders, the one on top might be able to hear better,” suggested Freak.
“Do I look like a cheerleader?” hissed Fiona.
“Do you want me to answer that?”
“I thought I just heard them say the name ‘Fiona,’ ” I said.
She glared at me.
“Really?”
I nodded.
She clambered into the chute. Freak looked at me and mouthed, “Really?”
I shook my head.
I crawled in after Fiona. The bottom of the chute had a curve to it, the better to enable dirty socks to fly out. Standing up was tricky. I managed, though, with Fiona standing on my shoulders. Then Freak forced his way in under me. We couldn’t have done it without the walls of the chute to lean against and absorb some of our weight. After a few moments of fumbling, Freak was standing upright, I was on his shoulders, and Fiona’s head was twelve feet closer to the voices than it had been.
“Your feet smell like Jell-O,” I informed her.
She kicked me lightly on the side of the head. I decided that meant she wanted me to shut up. Then, suddenly, her weight was off my shoulders. My first thought was that some sort of laundry creature had gotten her. Maybe a shirt had been stuck in the chute so long, it had evolved into something carnivorous. I imagined myself being watched by unblinking, button-like eyes.
I sent the beam of my flashlight up the chute. The seams where the metal segments of the shaft joined together formed ridges big enough to act as footholds. Fiona was using them to climb farther up the chute.
“I thought you had a problem with heights,” I whispered.
“Not in a confined space,” she whispered back.
She was right, I realized. The enclosed waterslide tube at Flanders Fun Park never gave her trouble, and that was over two stories high.
I stuck my flashlight through my belt and grabbed the nearest ridge. Footholds didn’t work well for me. Handholds did. I followed her up.
Ten feet above where she had been, she came to a stop in front of an opening similar to the one we had come in through. I squeezed up beside her. The opening had a fancy iron grate across it, with cutout curlicues and flower shapes that we could look through into the room beyond.
It was the gallery. I could just make out Guernica on the wall to our left. I briefly wondered why an art gallery would have a laundry chute. Then I realized the room might not always have been a gallery.
Alf was standing with his back to us, his hands on his hips. He was facing the painting of the woman in armor. The woman in armor was talking to him. The painted picture moved, like they were video chatting.
“… nor am I convinced the children are below his radar,” the woman was saying. “He sent doghats to the girl’s house.”
She looked off to her right, as though somebody might be whispering to her from beyond the edge of the picture frame.
“I underestimated them.” Alf nodded in agreement. “I had no idea they’d start an auction so soon after finding the crayon. I thought they’d simply bring the crayon to me, once they found out how valuable it was. I thought it would be a good way of appraising the girl. And the boys could be useful, too. They have no phones. They’re possibly the only ones in a ten-mile radius.”
The portrait’s eyes returned to Alf.
“The girl is too bright to have her personality wiped,” she said. She looked beyond Alf. She appeared to be looking at the grate of the laundry chute. Fiona and I both leaned back a little to put ourselves more in shadow. “I find the whole idea distasteful to begin with, bright or not. It’s the sort of thing he would do. I’m surprised at you for even toying with it.”
Alf hung his head. Even from the back, he looked embarrassed.
“I have no desire to live again at the cost of somebody else’s personality,” she continued. “And I don’t want to inhabit the body of an eleven-year-old. Going through puberty once was bad enough. Going through it twice would put it right up there with having my head chopped off.”
“I’ve corrected the sodium imbalance in the revivarium,” Alf said.
“Nor am I ready to be cloned.”
“Miranda.” Alf sounded exasperated. “Brothers and sisters share the same DNA. Mine is the same as yours.”
“If it were, you’d be a woman. I will not be cloned using my brother’s DNA. There’s a perfectly good surviving example of my own, true DNA. It’s frozen in a jar in Indorsia. Someday, I hope to retrieve it.”
“The way to Indorsia must be kept closed,” Alf reminded her.
“You may have a hard time keeping it closed. The boys may not have phones, but they still eat Agra Nation® snacks. It wouldn’t take much to have them singing show tunes along with everybody else.”
“But in the meantime, their minds are their own, and it’s safer for me to have them around than have any of the brainwashed locals. By Indorsian standards, these kids are babies. That’s the way he will see them. As babies. A twelve-year-old Indorsian Royal hasn’t even started school yet. If I keep them around, he’ll be less likely to suspect a trap. He may think the place is a day-care center.”
“Really, brother? Using kids as camouflage? And I thought I was the strategist.”
From the bottom of the laundry chute came the sound of an ax striking wood. It was followed by a disapproving tch-tch, then a muffled cry from Freak. Suddenly Alf was looking in our direction.
Fiona and I tried to hide by leaning farther back into the darkness, and I lost my footing. Fiona made a grab for me and we both plummeted down the shaft.
We got stuck halfway, with our bodies twisted together and me hanging head downward, like the clapper in a long, skinny bell. My ears rang with the sound of another ax blow.
Freak was no longer in the laundry chute.
I imagined him being pulled out by the ankles and attacked by something. Maybe the carnivorous shirt. I pictured red-checkered flannel, like a woodsman might wear. It would explain the sound of the ax.
Fiona twisted sideways and we slid the remaining six feet. I looked out through the chute’s opening and saw Freak dancing. He was moving around, dodging and darting, a look of panic on his face. Fiona levered a foot against my butt and pushed me into the room, where I saw exactly what had been making all the noise.
Freak was being pursued by an old lady with an ax.
She was ancient and gray but very limber. She hopped back and forth from foot to foot, tossing the ax from hand to hand like a martial-arts master, her white nightgown whirling and billowing around her with every move. She reminded me a little of Ms. Barrowman, the school librarian. Her eyes had the same piercing look.
She turned toward me when I hit the floor. As I staggered to my feet, she made the tch-tch sound and got a two-handed grip on the ax. She swung it at me like it was a baseball bat and I was a poorly pitched ball. I would have been on my way into center field, possibly without my head, if I hadn’t ducked in time. Sometimes being short has its advantages.
Freak picked up the bulletin board and held it like a shield. He lunged at the lady’s back and got her attention. An arm waved frantically at me from the laundry chute. Fiona was stuck.
The old lady noticed the arm the same moment I did and she turned away from Freak, sidled over to the wall, and raised her ax above Fiona’s wildly fluttering hand. Maybe the lady was a lumberjack. She was certainly eager to chop off limbs.
I grabbed Fiona’s hand and pulled with all my might. Fiona was folded in half inside the chute. She popped out just as the ax came down behind her, and I wasn’t sure it hadn’t sliced a layer of purple off her sweatshirt.
I hauled Fiona to her feet and Freak swung the bulletin board in front of us, creating a barrier between the
three of us and our assailant. The old lady hissed at us; her lower jaw detached from the top of her head and her mouth opened impossibly wide, like I had once seen a python’s do at the zoo just before it fed. Her mouth was full of needlelike teeth.
She swung the ax at the bulletin board as we all jumped away from her. The ax missed the board, but still made the noise an ax does when it hits wood. Which was odd, because it hadn’t struck anything. The old lady shrieked in anger and lunged at us again, about to bring her ax down on top of us.
We backed up against the door. Freak raised the board above our heads, and immediately an ax head stabbed through it, but there was no sound of wood splintering this time.
I found the doorknob and pulled. Fiona and Freak shoved the board in Ax Lady’s direction and we all squirmed out into the hall, slamming the door behind us.
“That was close!” I said, and found myself saying it to Ax Lady, who suddenly appeared in the hall with us.
“Tch-tch,” she said. She swung her ax again, and this time it passed through all three of us. We screamed in unison.
The old lady danced backward, threw her arms in the air, tilted her head back, and joined us in screaming. Her scream sounded like a cry of victory. Ours sounded more like three kids about to wet themselves.
We looked down at ourselves. The ax hadn’t done any damage.
The old lady stood between us and the only way we knew to get out of the house. Freak hesitated a moment, then plunged right through her. Fiona and I exchanged quick glances. She grabbed my hand and we followed Freak.
As soon as we had passed through the lady, I risked a glance over my shoulder. She had turned and was following us. Fiona and I pounded down the hall and caught up with Freak, and the three of us tumbled down the stairs, through the door, and out into the yard.
The lady loomed in the doorway behind us, then vanished. As we ran down the hill, I expected her to pop out from behind every tree we passed, but we made it to the entrance without getting chopped. We squeezed through the gate and it slammed shut behind us, nearly catching my shirttail.
I wasn’t surprised, as we ran past the spot, to see the sofa was no longer on the side of the road.