Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTERN TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There was no way to close the box now....
Inside, almost filling it, was what looked more than anything else like a kind of propeller. It had four oddly shaped, curving blades, one pointing directly at each corner of the box. The blades were a couple of inches below the top of the box. In the center of the blades was a kind of dial, like a round combination lock. But instead of numbers, around the dial were funny-looking symbols, sort of like hieroglyphics.
Things that looked like thorns or roots, gnarled and twisting and branching, clung to the inside surfaces of the metal box.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I especially didn’t like it that I couldn’t close it....
“Sleator’s use of language and his creation of characters, both human and alien, are captivating.”
-Children’s Literature
PUFFIN BOOKS BY WILLIAM SLEATOR
The Beasties
The Boxes
The Boy Who Reversed Himself
Dangerous Wishes
The Duplicate
The Green Futures of Tycho
House of Stairs
Interstellar Pig
Into the Dream
The Night the Heads Came
Oddballs
Others See Us
Singularity
The Spirit House
Strange Attractors
The author would like to thank Paul Curtis, architect, for his information about real-estate procedures, which helped a great deal with the plot.
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by Dutton Children’s Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998
Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000
Copyright © William Sleator, 1998
All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DUTTON EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Sleator, William.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14255-4
[1. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S63138Bn 1998 [Fic]-dc21 98-9285 CIP AC
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my father,
WILLIAM WARNER SLEATOR, JR.,
whose example of thoughtful calmness in almost any crisis has helped to keep me from being more of a nervous wreck than I already am
CHAPTER ONE
“And don’t try to open them. Don’t even think about trying to open them,” Uncle Marco said. “I’m leaving them with you because you’re the only person here I can trust. No one else can know they even exist.”
“What about Aunt Ruth?” I asked him. Aunt Ruth was my legal guardian; I lived in her house. My Uncle Marco did, too, when he was around, which was almost never.
Uncle Marco’s face hardened. “Especially not Ruth!” he said, his voice so uncharacteristically serious it was a little jolting. “That would be about the worst thing that could ever happen.” Aunt Ruth was his younger sister, but he didn’t get along with her any better than I did.
“Yeah, but... I mean, this is her house. If you’re leaving your boxes here with me, she could find them. Wouldn’t it be safer to put them in a bank vault or something? What’s in them, anyway?”
Uncle Marco pushed back his thick black hair. He had a narrow face with a strong nose and a cleft chin, and pale blue eyes. He was very good-looking. “First of all, Annie, they’re not my boxes,” he said. “They can’t belong to anybody; they just have to be guarded. And I don’t trust banks. All they care about is making money. Who could ever trust somebody like that? Ruth works in a bank! You’re ingenious enough to keep the boxes hidden.” He frowned in concentration. “Of course, they can’t be in the same place; they can’t be anywhere near each other. Your room ought to be pretty safe for one of them—it’s too much of a mess for anybody to find anything there. The other one can go in the basement. Ruth never goes down there. She’s terrified of the basement.” He moved his lips into a thin smile. “I made sure she was from the year one.”
“She never does go down there,” I said, thinking about it. “But why did you want her to be afraid of the basement? What did you do to frighten—”
“We better hurry,” he said, not answering me. “It’s five o’clock. She’ll be home from work soon. Let’s move the boxes now.”
Uncle Marco was always doing that, dropping some intriguing hint about something and then never explaining what he meant. He played with my curiosity. He was the same way about the places he was traveling to all the time. He would never say exactly where he was going, just that it was really important for him to be there right away.
“Is your uncle ever going to grow up and settle down?” Aunt Ruth would say disapprovingly whenever he was about to leave, which was always only a few days after he got back from the last place. Aunt Ruth was as critical of Uncle Marco as she was of me. Even though he was her older brother, she couldn’t stop telling me what he should do. The funny thing was, he looked so much younger than Aunt Ruth, even though she was forty-five and he was fifty. When I asked him about it privately, all he would say was that her rotten disposition had prematurely aged her. But she wasn’t prematurely aged; it was Uncle Marco who looked uncannily young.
Did I ever wish it was Uncle Marco who stayed at home and Aunt Ruth who was always away!
I’d been wishing this as long as I could remember. I never knew my parents; they died in an accident when I was an infant. My mother was the middle child. Even fifteen years ago, when the accident happened, Uncle Marco was already in the mysterious habit of traveling all the time, while Aunt Ruth had a steady job and was living in the old house our family had owned for generations. It only made sense for me to stay with her, in the eyes of the lawyers and the courts, and she went along with it. She’d had no choice, she was always telling me as soon as I was old enough to understand. She had sacrificed her life and a lot of her money for my sake—and if I didn’t start getting better grades or making more friends, she’d take me to the orphanage where I belonged.
This always made me feel horribly guilty. It was Uncle Marco who told me, when I was around ten, that Aunt Ruth really had it easy, and I hadn’t been any trouble for her at all. She had a free place to live; she had plenty of money even aside from her job at the bank; she could easily have afforded to hire nurses to take care of me when I was young, or day care when I was a little older. After I understood that, I didn’t feel as guilty. But I didn’t like Aunt Ruth any better. And no matter what, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to get her to like me.
>
If it hadn’t been for Uncle Marco’s visits, I don’t know what I would have done. It was Uncle Marco who comforted me, who listened to me, who understood me. He was the closest thing to a real parent I had, even though he was away so much. Sometimes I would beg him to take me with him. He said I was still too young—what he was doing was too important and too dangerous for him to put me at risk. After I was grown up—if I turned out to be a decent and trustworthy and independent person—then maybe he could make me his partner. Partner in what? I would ask. But he would never say.
Anyway, Aunt Ruth and the authorities would never have let him take me.
Now Uncle Marco pulled one box from out of his closet and the other from under his bed. He tore off the brown paper wrapping with his name and our address neatly printed on it in black marker. There was also a strange mark stamped on the paper in blue ink, something like a Chinese character. I wanted to ask him about it, but he didn’t give me a chance. “Okay. Which one do you want in your room, which one in the basement?” he asked me as we studied the two objects in his sparsely furnished, unlived-in bedroom.
“But what’s in them?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No time for that now, Annie. You’ve got to decide which one goes where.”
They were both the same size, cubes about a foot and a half on a side. One was wooden, like a simple crate, but with no gaps or cracks between the strips of wood. The other was dark gray, made out of some kind of metal, dented, stained, and corroded, as though it had been around for a very long time. Neither had what looked like a lid or a keyhole or any other visible means of being opened.
“It looks like there’s no way to open them, no matter how hard you try,” I murmured.
“That’s right,” he said brusquely. “They can’t be opened, period. Which one goes where?”
“Did they let you carry them both on the plane, or did you have to check them?” I asked. I had never been on an airplane-Aunt Ruth said she couldn’t afford to give me undeserved luxuries like that—but I had read and heard enough about traveling to know about carry-ons and checked bags.
“Check them?” Uncle Marco said, sounding a little confused. “You mean... Oh, of course. No, I didn’t check them! I couldn’t let anybody else handle them or risk losing them. Of course I, uh, carried them on.”
“They seem a little big to fit under the seat or—”
He looked at his watch. “We’ve got to hurry. Which one goes where?”
The wooden one looked like it belonged in a basement; the metal one looked too heavy to carry very far. “Let’s take the wooden one down to the basement and put the other one in my room,” I said.
Uncle Marco watched me from under his dark eyebrows. “You’re sure about that?”
“Why not?” I said, feeling uncomfortable now. “Is there something wrong with. doing it that way? What difference does it make if I can’t open them anyway?”
“I just wanted you to be sure. Once we’ve put them there, you won’t be able to move them on your own. Let’s go.”
They were both surprisingly heavy, and Uncle Marco took most of the weight. He was tall, and though he was slender, you could tell he was strong. He was wearing a black sleeveless sweater and a shirt of some ethnic woven material in blue, red, and purple. The sleeves were rolled up above his elbows, and veins and muscles stood out on his bare forearms as we maneuvered the wooden box down two flights of stairs. Again, I wondered how in the world he had carried both boxes onto the plane.
We put the wooden box in a far corner of the dark, smelly basement, hiding it behind some cardboard boxes. Uncle Marco brushed off his hands. Then he paused, thinking. “Is that development company still bugging Ruth about wanting to buy the house?” he said, looking back at where we put the box.
“Yeah, they are,” I said, a little out of breath. “They’re pressuring everybody in the neighborhood to sign away their houses soon so they can tear them down and build a giant mall. But Aunt Ruth swears she’ll never give in.”
“That’s good.” He sounded relieved. “Nobody’s as stubborn as Ruth! If she says she won’t sell, we’re safe.”
“Safe?” I asked him as we started up the stairs. “What do you mean, safe? What does selling the house have to do with the boxes?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He waved my question aside. “I was just curious, that’s all.”
Up in my room, we moved some junk out of my closet, put the metal box in there, then covered it with the junk. We were just finishing when we heard Aunt Ruth slam the front door at 5:31.
“Act normal, Annie. Do what you normally do when she gets home from work,” Uncle Marco told me.
So I stayed in my room and Uncle Marco went back to his.
Aunt Ruth didn’t call out a greeting or anything; she turned on the TV. She’d be glued to it until dinnertime. She never bothered much about cooking; she would just open cans or thaw something. Sometimes I made recipes myself, and they weren’t bad—Aunt Ruth ate the food, all right. But she would tell me I was wasting my time messing up the kitchen when I should be studying.
She told me to tell Uncle Marco he was wasting his time when he cooked, too, but he ignored her. Uncle Marco loved to cook and always made exotic and delicious food when he was home. He and I had had fun cooking together earlier, before he told me about the boxes. We had made a wonderful concoction of rice and sausage and seafood and vegetables, hearty and spicy, with different condiments to sprinkle on it. Now we went downstairs and heated it up. Aunt Ruth ate about twice as much as either of us. She didn’t like to cook, but she did like to eat. She had gained so much weight recently that she was starting to waddle, and her face was puffy. It didn’t help that her frizzy hair was rapidly turning gray.
Uncle Marco, ten years older, had an unlined face and perfectly black hair. He looked about twenty-five.
“Anne, ask your uncle where he’s off to next,” she told me when she had stopped shoveling in the food—she always refused to address Uncle Marco directly. “Oh, sorry,” she added. “I didn’t mean you to ask him where he’s going; I know he would never tell me that. I meant to ask when he is taking off next.”
“When, Uncle Marco?” I asked him, dreading the answer.
“Tell your aunt it’s the day after tomorrow, I’m afraid,” he said, looking sadly at me, as though he felt guilty for deserting me.
Aunt Ruth caught the glance. “Are you and your uncle hiding something from me?” she demanded, starting to get angry.
I turned to him.
“Why would I hide anything from my dear little sister?” Uncle Marco said smoothly.
“He’s not hiding anything,” I lied to Aunt Ruth.
Aunt Ruth snorted, really mad now. “He hides his whole life from me, for starters,” she said. “I know he’s the oldest, but I’m the one with clout at the bank, and I’m the executor of Father’s estate. Tell your uncle I could easily cut off his annuity and stop his gallivanting around for good. And I would if I felt he was turning you against me. You always were an ungrateful brat,” she added routinely.
She had threatened to cut off his money before, but it still made Uncle Marco uncomfortable enough that he appealed to her directly. “Please don’t be paranoid, Ruth,” he said, sounding genuinely concerned. “Annie and I aren’t hiding anything. We’re good friends, that’s all.”
“It’s just as well he’s leaving the day after tomorrow,” Aunt Ruth said to me, still refusing to respond to him. “I feel like an outsider in my own house when he’s around. And it’s not good for you to get used to having him here. The longer he stays, the longer you go through your self-pitying, malingering mood after he’s left.” She stood up. “You and your uncle can clean up the mess you made—I’ve been working hard all day. I’m sure you’d love more time alone together to say nasty things about me anyway.”
Uncle Marco and I didn’t look at each other.
Aunt Ruth moved away from the table, then turned back. “And if you and yo
ur uncle are hiding something from me, you can bet I’ll find out. And then”—she ran her finger across her throat—“no more annuity.” She waddled over to the TV.
CHAPTER TWO
What was in the boxes?
At school the next day, Friday, I ate lunch with my best friends, Linda and Jeff. We usually ate together, though it wasn’t only because they wanted my company. I was also kind of a screen. If they ate alone all the time, people would notice, and it could get back to their parents—and their parents absolutely did not want them to see each other at all. With me and sometimes others there, it wouldn’t look like anything special was going on between them.
Today, Henry ate with us, too. Henry lived close to us in the neighborhood, and he liked me. I knew I was 0.K., looks-wise. I have short black hair and dark eyes and I’m in good shape. Henry’s a nice guy, and good-looking, too. But I wasn’t interested in Henry or in any other boys my age. There weren’t any who were as smart or as fun or as mysterious or as handsome as Uncle Marco. Anyway, Aunt Ruth thought fifteen was too young to go out alone with a boy. We couldn’t double-date with Linda and Jeff because nobody could know they ever went out. So that was my excuse for not going out with Henry. But he kept reminding me that he was waiting for my sixteenth birthday.
“Annie, I gotta tell you what happened last night,” Henry said breathlessly as he sat down with his tray.
“Uh-huh,” I said, not paying much attention. I was thinking about the boxes. Curiosity about them was driving me crazy.
Henry lowered his voice, though Linda and Jeff were giggling together and not paying any attention anyway. “Around nine o’clock I went out to walk Fifi—you know, our bloodhound.”
“Mmm,” I said, nodding vaguely. If I just took a little peek inside the boxes after Uncle Marco left, how would he ever know?
“And as soon as I got to the sidewalk, this car pulled away from the curb,” Henry was saying. “I didn’t think anything about it at first—until I began to notice the car was going really slow, like it was following me!” He stared at me, wide-eyed.
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