by Eric Bower
Aunt Dorcas had disappeared. Like a sneeze in the wind.
SERIOUSLY, NO ONE HAS A MINT?
We looked everywhere for Aunt Dorcas, searching every corner of the Baron Estate including the closets, cupboards, luggage chests, attic, work garage, and the barn. We even got Rose Blackwood to help, and she was in a fouler mood than a two-ton tiger with a toothache.
I tried my best to cheer her up. Sometimes I’m good at that.
“Is there anything you want to talk about, Rose?” I asked while we searched through the dark and dusty attic together. It was spooky up there, so I was glad that I didn’t have to search through the dim corners of the rarely-visited Baron attic alone. There were rumors that M and P had hidden all sorts of weird and frightening things up there, terrible things, monstrous things, things that my crazy inventor parents would prefer remained secret from the world. (But then again, I’m the one who started those rumors, and I certainly can’t be trusted to tell the truth.)
Rose turned to me sharply, and I winced.
I had noticed that in the short period of time since Buddy had broken their engagement, everything that Rose touched had a terrible habit of becoming ripped, cracked, crushed, or thrown across the room with the force of crashing meteorite. This likely wasn’t a coincidence.
“No,” she said darkly.
“Are you sure? You seem pretty upset.”
Rose ripped the top off an old steamer trunk and hurled it across the attic. As it hit the wall, it exploded in a cloud of dust.
“Why would I be upset?” she asked, forcing herself to smile at me.
It was perhaps the least happy smile I’d ever seen. In fact, it looked more like a silent scream. I noticed that her right eye was twitching, and the little vein that ran up her temple was bulging like a balloon that had been slightly overfilled. All the muscles in her face tightened at the same time, and the effect was as unsettling as watching a snake attempting to eat itself. Rose picked up the old globe that was in the steamer trunk and hurled it across the room. It shattered into a billion little pieces. She “smiled” at me again, making my toes curl.
I cleared my throat and tried my best to say something helpful.
“Well, maybe you’re upset because you and Buddy Graham broke your engagement, and now you’re all alone again, possibly forever?”
This time, the thing that Rose picked up and hurled across the room was me.
Yes, I had hit a growth spurt and was practically the same height as Rose. But you should never underestimate an angry Blackwood. There’s a reason why their name is the most feared name in the country. They’re physically strong beyond belief. Legend has it, Rose’s great grandfather wrestled bears in his free time. Rose’s great grandmother would come out and separate him and the bears when it was time for supper, lifting each of them up with one of her freakishly strong Blackwood hands.
So I flew all the way across the room and out the attic window, landing in a peach tree in my mother’s fruit garden, which was actually rather convenient, since I was feeling snackish. As I snacked on the peaches in the tree, Rose stuck her head out the window and looked down at me.
“W. B.!” she cried. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! I meant to move you out of my way, not throw you out the window! I’m afraid I lost my temper, and sometimes when I do that, I don’t know my own strength. I promise it’ll never happen again. Please forgive me?”
“Of course,” I said through a mouthful of peach. “I know you’re just upset that your wedding was called off, and now everyone in Pitchfork will be talking about it. You have a right to be upset, Rose. I mean, they’re all probably laughing about it, and coming up with terrible and funny nicknames for you. I’ve thought up a few good ones myself, if you’d like to hear them. If I were you, I would probably—”
I didn’t have the chance to tell Rose Blackwood what I’d do if I were in her place because she then flung one of her red boots out the window. It clocked me in the head and knocked me off my branch.
As I landed in the grass, about a half-dozen peaches fell out of the tree and bonked me on the head, one at a time.
Rude, rude, rude . . .
Once I’d finished cleaning the peach juice from my ear, I heard the clatter of complicated clockwork. It was M and P, pulling up to the fence in their mechanical horseless carriage, which sputtered and clicked twice more, before finally falling silent. My parents took off their leather riding caps and safety glasses and wiped the residual desert dust from their cheeks with their handkerchiefs. They had driven through the desert to search for my aunt, venturing all the way into Downtown Pitchfork to see if she was visiting any of her friends or favorite spots.
“No luck in town?” I asked. “No one has seen Aunt . . . Dorcas?”
Hmm. That was odd. For a moment I couldn’t seem to remember her name. How can a person suddenly forget their aunt’s name? Especially when she has a name like “Dorcas”?
“No,” M answered quietly. She cleaned her safety glasses with hands that visibly shook.
“And what’s even worse than that,” P continued, “is that no one in town seemed to have any idea—”
“Oh, McLaron, please don’t say it!” my mother begged.
“Say what?” I asked, finishing off another peach and tossing the pit into the bushes. “Why are you two so upset? Does it have anything to do with Buddy Graham dumping Rose? Is everyone in town already talking about that? What mean nicknames are they calling Rose? Are they saying that she stinks too badly to be named after a flower? Are they saying she should have been named Onion Patch Blackwood instead?”
A second red boot flew out the window and bonked me on the head.
“Ow.”
I suppose I had that one coming.
Without explaining what it was that had upset them, my parents jumped from the horseless carriage and rushed into the house. I followed them as quickly as I could, wiping the peach juice from my hands onto my trousers as I ran. We dashed up the stairs, taking them three at a time, before thundering down the hall and into Aunt . . . (Deena? Dora? Dirkle? Is Dirkle a name? Hmmm . . . wait, I’ve got it!) Aunt Dorcas’s room.
Huh. That’s the second time I couldn’t remember her name. Why was that suddenly happening to me? I’d never struggled to remember her name before, even when I was trying my hardest to pretend that she didn’t exist. Was there something wrong with my mind? And is Dirkle actually a name? It sort of sounds like one, doesn’t it? But it also sort of doesn’t.
My parents flung open Aunt Dorcas’s bedroom door and gasped in shock. I looked into the bedroom and sneezed in the most shocked manner possible.
Her room was completely empty.
Gone were the ruffles and lace and doilies on every surface, and the stuffed animals and throw pillows she’d piled on the bed like a cozy fortress, and the collection of creepy porcelain dolls on the shelf (with realistic looking eyes that seemed to follow and judge you when you went inside). Also gone was the weird, flowery perfume smell, which always clung to my aunt like she’d just been sprayed by the world’s fanciest skunk.
Now there was so much dust on the floor and cobwebs in the corners that it looked as though the room had been empty for at least ten or fifteen years, if not longer. The windows were so smudged and filthy that staring through them would have been like trying to see to the bottom of a mud pit. There was also a terrible, stuffy, stale stench in the room, like the breath of a gross animal that lived off a simple diet of other gross animals. In short, it was disgusting.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened here? Where is all of her stuff ?”
“Who’s stuff ?” Rose asked, as she joined us in the doorway of the empty bedroom.
“You know,” I said, turning to Rose in surprise. “The stuff of the person we’re looking for. Aunt . . . Aunt . . . what’s-her-name . . .”
“Was it Doreen?” P suggested. “Or Darla? Dirndl? Darkle? Is Darkle even a name?
It sounds sort of like a name. But it also sort of doesn’t. Hmmm . . . Dirkle . . .”
“Dirkle . . .” I repeated, rubbing my chin with my thumb and forefinger.
“Dorcas!” my mother suddenly cried, snapping her fingers. “Her name is Dorcas! For some reason, that name is trying its best to sneak its way out of our brains!” She reached into the front pocket of her work overalls and took out a pen. After rolling up her sleeves, she wrote my aunt’s name on her forearm. “Everyone, please take this pen and write her name on your arm! Something is trying to make us forget it!”
We all did as we were told, writing the name “Dorcas” on our forearms in ink. Once I had printed the name in my messy handwriting, I stared at it in bewilderment. I had always hated my name, Waldo, but I had to admit it wasn’t as bad as Dorcas. Dorcas. Suddenly that name sounded so strange and foreign to me. It didn’t sound like a real name at all. Dorcas. It was like I had just learned a word in the secret language of the frogs or something.
I tried my best to remember who this Dorcas person was, but the only picture of her I had in my mind quickly shrinking, fading into darkness, until it looked like little more than an accidental inkblot on a napkin. It was a shadow from the past that seemed less and less real with every passing second. I started wondering if this person had ever really existed, or if my mother was simply playing a trick on all of us. It wasn’t like M to play tricks, but it also wasn’t like the rest of us to suddenly forget a family member’s existence. We’ve never done that before.
At least . . . I don’t think we have.
My father’s jaw dropped as he continued to slowly turn through the pages of The Hilarious Mis-Adventures of the Ridiculous Baron Family.
“An entire chapter of this book just disappeared,” he whispered. “All mention of . . . Dorcas, is now gone.”
The revelation was like a splash of ice water down our trousers. The four of us stood there in shock, staring into the dusty room of a person who was little more than a hollow reflection in our brains, trying desperately to remember anything about them.
Try to remember a short and boring dream you had about six years ago, on a random Thursday night. That’s what it felt like trying to remember anything about Aunt . . . I had to check my forearm again . . . Dorcas. It was impossible. We all searched our minds (I noticed that I managed to finish searching long before the others), but we found no trace of her.
“What’s happening to us? And what’s causing the book to change?” asked Rose as she turned instinctively to my father. “Mr. Baron, you have to have some idea about why our memories and lives are suddenly rewriting themselves. I can’t remember—” she glanced at her forearm, “—Dorcas at all anymore. But I know that this room hasn’t always been empty. What’s going on?”
“Yes, McLaron, you must have some idea what’s behind all this,” my mother pleaded. “What’s happened to my sister? She was my sister, right? Not yours?”
My father took a deep and dramatic breath, and then began to cough violently. There was simply too much dust in the empty bedroom for us to take dramatic breaths. P hacked and wheezed as he stomped his feet, disturbing all the poor spiders that were living in the room as my mother and Rose took turns whacking him on the back. We stepped out of the bedroom and headed for my parents’ work garage, which was where we usually went to discuss odd things.
“I don’t know for certain what’s behind all of this,” P explained, closing the work garage door and then holding up his copy of the Baron book, “but I do know for certain who is behind it.”
He pointed to the name of the author of The Hilarious Mis-Adventures of the Ridiculous Baron Family, which was printed in tiny lettering on the back of the novel. The printing was so small that we probably would have missed it if P hadn’t hovered his magnifying glass over it.
“Written by Werbert Turmerberm,” I read aloud. “Wait, that’s his real name? Werbert?”
“It can’t be,” said Rose. “No one is named Werbert.”
“Maybe his mother named him when her mouth was full of caramel.”
“Werbert Turmerberm . . .” my mother said as she pinched her chin and wrinkled her forehead. “Why does that name sound so familiar to me?”
“I mentioned him to you many years ago, Sharon,” my father told her. “Don’t you remember? Werbert? Werbert Turmerberm? My greatest enemy? From the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery? I had promised myself never to speak his name again, but now it appears as though I have no choice. Werbert Turmerberm is the one behind this.”
“Why is a dentist your worst enemy?” I asked.
My father set the book on his workbench and stared sadly out the window.
“Because,” he said with a heavy sigh as he began the long, strange, and sad tale of Werbert Turmerberm, “I ruined his life.”
“Back in the early 1870s, before I met your mother, I left my home in Valdosta, Georgia to attend the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery with my best friend, John Henry Holliday. John Henry and I were determined to become the greatest pair of dentists that the world had ever seen. Better than Pierre Fauchard, even!”
“Who the heck is Pierre Fauchard?” I whispered to Rose.
“I have no idea. But if you ask, I’m sure he’ll give you a very long and boring explanation,” Rose whispered back. I nodded my head and kept quiet.
“As you might have guessed, dental school was very competitive,” P continued, smiling as he thought of his old college days. “You can imagine what it must have been like, a bunch of young, hotshot, future dentists. We were a pretty wild group—rowdy young kids with a shared love of teeth. We were all very good students, though. And the top three students in the class were me, John Henry (whom we all called ‘Doc’), and Werbert Turmerberm.”
“That seriously can’t be his name . . .”
My father ignored me as he began rifling through one of the drawers in his workbench.
“Every student in class wanted to be like me and Doc. Doc was a brilliant man, very clever and funny, though he had a bit of a temper, and would often play cards late at night when he should have been studying. But he was an excellent student. I was also an excellent student, but where I really excelled was inventing new and interesting devices for dentists to use. In fact, a lot of my early dental inventions are still being used by dentists today.”
He pulled out a metal invention that looked like a mechanical beaver trap with a leather strap fastened to the back. It was coated with a fine layer of dust and cobwebs, and the hinge creaked like it was badly in need of grease.
“This is one of my earliest dental inventions,” he said proudly. “My professors all said that it would change the practice of dentistry forever. It didn’t, but they still said it would, which was rather nice of them.”
“What is it?” Rose asked.
P smiled.
“Why don’t I show you? W. B., come over here, please.”
“Okay.”
I bounced over to the workbench, where P told me to have a seat on one of the little wooden stools. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a cloth cover, which he then wrapped around my neck, as though he was about to give me a haircut. I sat there uncertainly, wondering what might happen next, and then he brought the mysterious invention closer to my face. It smelled pretty terrible.
“Open wide, son.”
I looked from the rusty and dusty device, to my father staring at me expectantly, and quickly shook my head.
“No way. That thing is dirty and rusty and gross, P. I don’t want it anywhere near my mou—”
Before I could finish my sentence, P had jammed the metal bit into my mouth and wrapped the leather strap around the back of my head, fastening and tightening it to its tightest setting.
I wanted to scream . . . but I couldn’t. The device was on some sort of spring, and once the metal part locked into my mouth, it caused my mouth to pop wide open, and stay open. I tried to reach up and undo
the straps so I could pull the invention off my head, but I couldn’t manage to do that either. In fact, I couldn’t move at all! It felt like someone had frozen my arms and legs, and now all I could do was sit there silently with my mouth wide open like a yawning potato.
“This, is my O.W.S. Device, also known as my Open Wide, Stephen, Device,” P told my mother and Rose. “It’s meant for young patients and patients who are afraid of dentists. It keeps them from squirming and shouting and moving around during an examination. In addition to keeping the patient’s mouth open, the device also presses against several nerves in their mouth and on the back of their neck that temporarily paralyzes their body. They literally can’t move or get away. They can’t even scream for help.”
“What?” M gasped, looking at me in horror. “You mean you just paralyzed our son?”
“Temporarily,” P said, sounding slightly defensive as he undid the strap on the back of my head. “He’s fine though. See?”
Suddenly I could move again. I rubbed my aching jaw and smacked my lips. My mouth tasted like I’d just spent the past twenty minutes licking an old shovelhead. There was also a light thudding in the back of my head, as though a common squirrel monkey was gently pounding it with a rubber mallet. That O.W.S. Device was really something.
“Never been better,” I choked.
When no one was looking, I quickly stuffed the O.W.S. Device into my back pocket. I wanted to be certain that no one would ever have the chance to put that awful thing on me ever again. Aside from the unnerving feeling of my body being completely frozen, the metal part of the invention also tasted terrible. That dirty and rusty flavor was really lingering in my mouth and was starting to make me feel a bit sick. I wished I had a chocolate cake or a raspberry pie (or preferably both) to cover up the awful taste, and I briefly wondered if P would mind if I took a short break from his story to do some light baking.
“He’s fine. Anyway, back to my story. Werbert was jealous of me and Doc because the professors were always praising us for our natural dentistry talents. The other students preferred us to him as well. I hate to say it, but Werbert was a bit of a weirdo.”