by B. V. Larson
“What’s your plan, Connor?” she asked desperately.
I look both ways down the corridor. The floor was so covered in dust that if we walked in it we would surely show which way we had gone. I took a plank that leaned against a wall and put it on the floor. I walked along the plank to the nearest cell door. It was locked, so I tried two others. Finally, one opened on stiff, groaning hinges.
“Quick, come along the plank and hide in here.”
She followed, but balked when we got to the cell. “What if they lock us in?”
I grabbed her hand and aimed the flashlight at the cell door’s lock. It had been torn out like a bad tooth. “I doubt they will be able to lock that,” I said.
“Did something escape from here?”
I shrugged, not wanting to tell her that was exactly what I thought had happened. She reluctantly went inside, shining her light everywhere as if she expected a dozen skeletons to jump out at her.
When she was inside, I trotted the other way down the corridor.
“Wait!” she cried, “Don’t leave me Connor!”
“Shhhh!” I said, “I’ll be right back.”
What I did was run back and forth a few times, stirring up the dust and leaving plenty of footprints going away from our cell. Then I came back and walked the plank to Beth.
We sat huddled in the cell for what seemed like hours, but which was probably only minutes. Beth played the light around on the walls. They were made of rounded river stones, like the level above us, but down here they were even more dank. In places, slippery moss grew down the walls where water trickled down from somewhere above. We found an old wooden table in the cell, with a stool sitting at the table. On the table was a quill pen like I’d seen at museums, and a loose leaf book with a thick cover that looked like it was made of leather.
“A book?” asked Beth. She picked it up and dust puffed up in our faces.
We heard voices above in the stables level. They were coming.
Beth and I cupped the flashlight to hide the light as much as we could and dragged the plank into the cell with us. We pushed the creaking cell door closed as quietly as we could. The broken latch didn’t let it go all the way shut, but it would look good enough from outside. Beth grabbed up the ancient dust-covered book and slid it under her arm. I frowned, wondering what kind of grim family secrets were in that book. We had a habit of not looking at our past too closely in my family.
We snapped off the light when we heard steps on the stairs. I heard a single, sharp bark, and I knew a new fear. If Danny or Thomas could sniff us out, all my work would be for nothing.
I was glad to hear a sneeze. It was a dog-sneeze, I felt fairly sure of it. A furry head poked down into the dungeon and I slipped back against the crumbling walls of our cell.
“Get a light down here,” said Danny in a growling voice. Sometimes, it was hard for us to speak when we were fully changed into animal form.
“I don’t think they’re down here, Danny,” said another voice, this one whiny. I thought it was Thomas.
“Get down here you chicken. I smell a rat.”
“It’s a dungeon, man, of course there are rats.”
“Not this big! Come on.”
More steps and a growing pool of light. They had a lantern of some kind.
“They’re down here, I knew it! Look at the footprints. Get everyone.”
“Now who’s scared of a rat?” chuckled Thomas.
“Okay we don’t need help. Follow me.”
They were in the hallway now. I could tell by the way the light was splashing the walls further away from us that they had taken the bait. They wandered further away, and still we waited. A few more kids showed up and followed them. When it was quiet again, I gave Beth’s hand a yank and we ran for it.
We burst out of the cell and ran up the steps. We pulled the door closed behind us, and I gathered up the rope I’d left on the stairs. I quickly tied one end to the loop of iron and the other to the stairway rail. They were trapped down there for now.
Beth and I took a moment to grin at each other. I hope it scared the heck out of them.
We rushed up the steps and spilled out into the room with all the horse harnesses when we ran straight into Sarah.
We almost knocked each other down.
“Connor?” Sarah stared at us and the dungeon door. She blinked. “Did you lock them down there?” she asked, and then she laughed.
I looked at her darkly. I put a hand out protectively in front of Beth, I did it automatically, without even thinking about it. “Don’t get in my way, Sarah.”
Her eyes took in the way that I was protecting Beth. She pursed her lips in a disgusted expression.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you and your girly away.”
I softened my expression. “Thanks,” I said. “Could you play deaf for a while too and leave them down there?”
She giggled and shook her head at me. “One last great prank. Okay, Connor.”
“I owe you,” I said, and as I walked past her, I kissed her on the forehead.
Both girls gave me a bewildered look, and I felt a rush of embarrassment. What had made me do that? Not giving anyone a chance to think more about it, not even me, I ran out of the room with Beth right behind me.
One last prank, Sarah had said. Would this really be my last one?
Chapter Thirty-One
The Book
We found a new hiding place: the dormitories. Who would expect us to simply return to our rooms, the very heart of enemy territory? I figured it was foolproof and the last place they would look, but Beth was quite nervous.
“One of them will come back any second for a hairbrush or something.”
“This room was shared by Jake, Chris Anderson and I,” I said. “The only thing Chris Anderson would come back for would be a nap.”
She laughed quietly, but still seemed nervous. She paged through the book she had lugged up the stairs from the dungeon cell. I’d suggested she dump it a few times, but she had refused. I did get her to put it down for a while.
One of the reasons I chose this room was because of the secret snack supplies. Both Jake and Chris were chunky guys, and they could be counted on to have a stash of food somewhere. We found a bag of chips under Chris Anderson’s bed, but the big score was a full bag of peanuts and a full soda in Jake’s backpack. We ate this happily. Food always tastes best when you are really hungry.
After a few hours of waiting around with our fists shoved up against our cheeks, she began poking around with the book again.
“It must be getting dark outside,” I said, eyeing her and the book. “Maybe we should go have a look around.”
“You don’t want me to read this, do you?”
“Why don’t you put that book down, Beth?”
“What do you think might be written in here?” she asked, looking from the book to me, and then back to the book. She had it laid across her lap.
I hesitated. “Well, some of our family history isn’t very happy.”
“I’ve figured that out.”
“I can’t imagine that a book found in a hidden dungeon beneath our mansion could have a happy story in it.”
She nodded, looking at the book curiously. She polished off spots of dust that still hid in the creases of the leather cover. She opened the book, and my chest tightened. I thought about grabbing it out of her hands, but held myself back.
“There’s a title…” she said.
“What?” I asked.
She smiled. “You sure you want to know?”
“No,” I said. “Forget it. Just close it up again.”
“It’s called Alchemical Experiments.”
I raised my eyebrows. That did sound interesting. Alchemy was the study of half-magical sciences, things that normal schools taught you were all nonsense. In our family, alchemy was considered a legitimate pursuit. I slid closer to Beth. We both sat on Jake’s bed. I cocked my head to read the book with her.
“Apparently,” I said. “Or maybe this book comes from somewhere else.”
She nodded and we began to puzzle through the book. It was more like a collection of essays than anything else, written on old crumbling parchment and piled in between the leather covers like a binder of loose paper notes. Some of the pages were torn or missing. Others were impossible to read or in foreign languages.
We found a clearly written essay at last. It was titled simply “ The Beginning. ” The first page had been stained so badly you couldn’t read it, but the second page grabbed our attention immediately.
***
…of course, being of sound mind and memory, this stranger’s story of my own creation seemed preposterous. I could quite clearly recall a family I’d grown up with, but not my early childhood, I will admit. The family that raised me had been an adopted one, or so they had told me. They had all been killed mysteriously one night soon after I’d come of age. I’d spent a century searching for the killers, but without success. I had to admit, however, that the stranger’s story about an alchemist he called the maker was more than an intriguing fantasy. His words disturbed me. I’d heard of alchemists, people who experiment with the thin line between science and magic. Sometimes people called them sorcerers, but others put them in a very different category. For this stranger to come along and inform me that my very long, secret life had started as an alchemical experiment which had gone horribly wrong I found unsettling.
The stranger’s knowledge of me and my secrets I found disturbing as well. I had long known I blacked out at nights sometimes, especially during the fullest cycle of the moon. I often found myself in a disheveled state in the morning, haunted by dark dreams. Sometimes, I later learned that bad things had happened during the night that I had no memory of, but which left me feeling strangely guilty.
Just looking at this stranger and hearing his story about me, with his intense gaze and looming eyes, made me want him to vanish. I didn’t want to think about what happened on nights when the moon was fullest. He became angry when I said as much to him, and I no longer…
Here the paper became torn and unreadable.
Beth closed the book and looked at me.
“What are you doing?” I asked in exasperation.
“You sure you want to keep reading?” she said sweetly. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should stop now.”
I growled at her and opened the book again. Beth and I flipped through the delicate pages as quickly as we dared, looking for another scrap of the story. At last, we found it.
…how I learned that the stranger was indeed a cousin of mine, not through natural means, exactly, but a cousin nonetheless as we both shared the same maker, the Alchemist. The stranger has long since left me. He was barely alive, I should think, after our argument. A lesser man would not have survived at all. I was glad to see him go, but was still disturbed by his story. I made a solemn promise to myself that I would seek out the alchemist. Perhaps he may still cling to life even after centuries had passed. After all, I had continued to live without growing gray-haired and weak, so why would he not have taken the same alchemical baths and thus relieved himself from the burden of aging?
The essay ended there, and we both saw the signature. Beth and I gasped in unison. The name signed at the bottom of the page was Vater.
We looked at each other in shock.
“Vater wrote this?” whispered Beth.
I thought about it for a moment, and it all seemed to make perfect sense. “Of course, he did,” I said. “That story fits with what little I know of him. What gets me is that he might have been locked in down there. Do you think that he was a prisoner there? Do you think that was his cell?”
“The lock was broken…” said Beth.
I stood up and paced the room. I tapped my fingers on my chin. “One night, when the moon is at its fullest…”
“And Vater changed and became strong enough to break out,” finished Beth for me.
We heard a sound then, a strange warbling sound that rang through the mansion. We stopped talking and tried not to breathe while we listened for it again. We didn’t hear anything else for awhile, and relaxed.
“Well then, who really owned this mansion then, anyway?” I asked.
Beth looked at me. “The maker?” she whispered.
“The alchemist,” I said, nodding. It all made sense.
“Then he’s the one who built that freaky room…” said Beth.
“The one who made all of us, originally,” I said. The thought was so huge I couldn’t completely understand everything it meant. I felt like I’d learned my parents were really aliens. Perhaps, in a way, they really were.
The sound came again, and this time there was no mistaking it for what it was. It was the sound of howling, the sound a wild dog pack might make while hunting.
I knew in an instant what it was. Danny and Thomas had made it out of the dungeon.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Hunt
We shoved the book under Chris Anderson’s bed and ran. This time, Beth didn’t try to take the book with us. I think she was finally spooked by it, the way I was, and didn’t really want to read any more right now.
“What are you then, genetic freaks? Mutations?”
“Rude people might call it that, I suppose.”
“We’ve got a dogpack of your relatives chasing us,” said Beth.
“Okay. You’ve got a point.”
We trotted quickly and quietly down the dimly lit hallways. We didn’t see anyone, but we could voices echoing from behind us. They coming closer. I began to run, Beth followed me.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to the place they searched first. The attic.”
We almost didn’t make it. There were footsteps and angry voices underneath the trapdoor just moments after we pulled it up. I wondered if the hanging string we’d used to pull the ladder down was swaying in front of their faces, giving us away.
If it was, no one seemed to notice. The voices came very close and stopped right under us.
“I smell them,” said Thomas in his dog voice. “Right here, and all down these halls. It’s a bit stronger right here.”
“He’s a tricky one,” said Danny. “Just like the dirty rat he is. I’ve always disliked him and now I know why. Dog’s hate rats. It’s only natural. Vater knew too. Vater knew right away he didn’t belong.”
Mouse, I shouted in my head. I’m a Mouse. Beth reached out and squeezed my hand as if she knew what I was thinking.
I fought to control my thoughts. My tail wanted to sprout again, I could feel it.
“What are we going to do if we catch them?” said Thomas.
“A dog’s teeth aren’t for barking,” said Danny. They laughed. The sound was a strange gargling noise coming from their animal throats.
I wondered if a rat’s fangs could match a dog’s if they were evenly sized. I bet they could. I bet that rats-I mean mice — only lost fights with dogs because dogs were bigger. I sort of liked the thought and felt my lips pull back in a snarl. I tried to stop the change, not wanting to scare Beth. My mouth suddenly felt very full of sharp teeth, but I didn’t think she noticed in the dark. I was alarmed, the change sort of snuck up on you, like a yawn. You would think of it vaguely one minute, and then the next you would be unhinging your jaws in a howling big yawn. Trying to stop the change was just as hard as stifling a yawn or a sneeze.
We heard snuffling sounds as they tried to pick up the scent. The batteries were dead in Beth’s flashlight. We huddled quietly in the dark. Hiding and knowing the people searching for me were very close always made my heart race. I could hear my blood pounding in my ears and wondered if a dog’s ears were sharp enough to hear it too.
&nb
sp; “Do you think..?” asked Thomas after a few moments.
“Yeah. Leave the others behind to search the rooms. Come on, this way,” said Danny. They ran off with their claws clicking on the hardwood floors.
When they’d gone, I jumped up and dragged Beth to her feet.
“They know,” I told her.
“How did they figure it out?”
“The scent trail ended at the trapdoor, you don’t have to be a genius dog to imagine how we might have vanished. They will go around to take the stairs so they can stay in dog form and surprise us.”
We ran through the attic. I felt like the game was almost up. I was running out of gas, getting tired. We’d done pretty well, I thought to myself. We’d kept hidden for over twelve hours now. It was dusk outside. I had hoped that they would all stop to eat something, but they showed no signs of having a seven-course meal and giving us a break.
Bad thoughts came to me about the dungeon and all those dark, dusty cells. Who else besides Vater had been left to rot down there? Would we, possibly, be locked up down there if they caught us?
“What are we going to do, Connor? They are under us and coming up.”
“We go up to the roof,” I said.
We ran to one of the roof exits, one of those square small doors with the little door handles. An idea came to me like a thunderbolt. I knew right then why the doors up here were made that way.
“Look at this door handle, Beth,” I said.
“Okay…”
“If small people, or animals, lived up here they would be able to open these small doors. The handles were low enough so that even a smart housecat would have no problem working with them.”