Saving Thanehaven

by Catherine Jinks

  “There it is,” he observes. “Off you go, son.”

  “Is this where I—?”

  “That’s where the key fits. In that slot. All you have to do is stick it in there and twist it.” The Kernel flips his wrist to demonstrate.

  “We both know how to turn a key!” the princess growls, insulted on Noble’s behalf. But Noble doesn’t take offense, because he isn’t, in fact, very familiar with keys. He unlocks the door quite gingerly, before giving it a tentative push.

  It swings open to reveal a flight of ascending stairs, with another door at the top.

  “Would you hold this door for me? Until I come back?” he asks the Kernel, who shakes his head.

  “Nup. Sorry.”

  “Let me do it,” the princess offers. She darts forward to grab the door. With his foot on the bottom step, Noble pauses to give Lorellina a few final words of advice.

  “Don’t worry if you need to secure your access points. I have a key, so if something bad starts heading down these stairs—”

  “I know. You can always let yourself in later.” The princess speaks briskly.

  “And the same goes for anything that’s worrying you in here,” Noble continues. “Don’t hesitate to follow your judgment—”

  “Just go, will you?” she snaps. “Hurry! Before we lose Rufus!”

  Chastened, Noble advances. His bare feet make no sound on the staircase because it’s covered in royal-blue carpet; the door at the top is painted a lighter blue. It proves to be unlocked, and Noble pulls it open to find himself looking into a large room packed with row upon row of empty chairs. They’re all facing a wall that’s like a giant window, framed by dark-blue curtains. A pale, fluttering light seems to be pouring through this window, but from where he’s standing, Noble can’t see the source of the light.

  Then it occurs to him that this window might actually be a very large version of the screens in the glass booth.

  “Is Rufus there?” Lorellina calls to him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Noble replies. The words have hardly rolled off his tongue before a voice rings out, so loudly and harshly that he covers his ears.

  “Oh, man, that looks great! Lou is totally going to freak!”

  It’s Rufus’s voice.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Who was that?” Lorellina exclaims, from the bottom of the stairs. “Was that Rufus?”

  “I—I’m not sure.” Noble can’t understand what he just heard. Rufus is nowhere to be seen, so where did his voice come from?

  Unless he’s hiding behind a row of seats?

  “If she’s not in here, she must be watching TV,” Rufus blares. It’s as if he’s shouting through a trumpet. He’s never sounded like this before.

  “Where is he?” The princess speaks sharply. “Can you see him?”

  “No.” Then something occurs to Noble. “I have to go. I’ll be back soon.”

  He takes a step forward, letting the pale-blue door swing shut behind him. Another step gives him an angled view of the giant window to his left, which is busy with moving shapes and swirling colors.

  “Shhh!” Rufus’s voice has become a fuzzy, crackling hiss, still loud but not piercing. “We’ll sneak up on her.…”

  After taking three more steps, Noble finds himself staring up at Rufus’s face. It’s so big that it dwarfs Noble, who’s confused at how distorted it looks. But he quickly realizes that if he mounts the chair-covered slope opposite the screen, he’ll be able to see more.

  This must be some kind of audience chamber, he thinks as he climbs toward a door at the top of the slope. Except that instead of looking at a king on a throne, the audience has to look at pictures.

  Noble is hoping that these pictures might show him where Rufus actually is. But when he finally turns around, halfway up the carpeted staircase, he realizes that the Rufus in front of him—the one whose face is a hundred times bigger than normal—is also much younger than the one he spotted earlier, on the Kernel’s screen. I guess this isn’t my Rufus, Noble decides. It must be the boy who was in those photographs, only now he’s in a moving picture.

  He watches the young Rufus turn away from him, bobbing and weaving. Rufus seems to be walking down some kind of hallway, which is painted white, with several doors leading off it. He keeps glancing over his shoulder with a grin, as if inviting Noble to enjoy a joke, though Noble can’t imagine what that joke might be.

  Then the young Rufus reaches an open door, beyond which lies a large, sunlit room. He halts suddenly. Only when the picture stabilizes does Noble understand what’s been going on. All the flickering windows in the Kernel’s booth are like normal windows, fixed and motionless, but the giant window in the audience chamber is moving. It’s moving with the young Rufus, following him down a corridor, hurrying when he hurries, stopping when he stops. Noble begins to wonder if the window actually is a window. Or could it be the window in some sort of vehicle, like a van or a truck?

  All at once, the young Rufus turns his head and whispers, “Here she is. She’s playing some stupid game.” Noble is shocked. Surely, the boy up there isn’t talking to him? As Rufus pulls a grotesque mask over his face, Noble is confused by a hand that suddenly appears, reaching out to help adjust the mask’s slack, rubbery features. This hand seems to be coming from behind the window. But how could it? Noble is behind the window—Noble and the chamber in which he stands.

  It occurs to him that he might be looking at the young Rufus through someone else’s eyes. The window itself might not be in a truck or a van; it might be in somebody’s head. This becomes even more probable when he hears giggling. It can’t be Rufus giggling, because Rufus has put a finger to his molded rubber lips and is saying, “Shhh!”

  The giggler, Noble concludes, must be the person following Rufus. And when Rufus mutters, “Mikey! Shut up!” Noble finally identifies the owner of the hand.

  It’s Mikey.

  The window must be Mikey’s window. It must be Mikey who’s trailing after Rufus, helping with his disguise and breathing so heavily that the sound is like a stiff breeze gusting through an arrow slit. Noble is dazzled by a sudden burst of light as the action on screen shifts from the dim, narrow hallway into a wide, sunny room, full of chairs and cushions and curtains and books and little tables. Then a small, hunched figure drifts into the frame, and the window stops moving.

  A young girl is sitting with her back to the two boys. She’s so short that she’s swinging her feet; she’s also tapping away at something on the desk in front of her, as she stares at a screen that’s almost identical to the Kernel’s. Her black hair is tied in two pigtails, and she wears frilly pink socks. Noble quickly deduces that she must be Mikey’s sister, Louise.

  He recognizes the dress that she’s wearing from some of the photographs he saw on top of a pile of discarded pictures in a garbage dump. He also recognizes the gray cat asleep under her chair. And he realizes, with a gasp, that he must be looking at the inside of Mikey’s home.

  Louise is so engrossed in what she’s doing that she doesn’t notice her brother or his friend. Rufus creeps up behind her in his scary mask (which looks like a decomposing skull) and thrusts his head over her shoulder. “Boo!” he cries. The little girl screams. Rufus laughs. So does Mikey, whose profile suddenly appears on the screen. His high cheekbones and dark eyes are familiar to Noble, who’s seen them before, on top of a garbage dump.

  The cluttered, sunny space around Mikey’s laughing face swings like a pendulum.

  That’s when Noble figures out that the window must belong to something in Mikey’s hand. Some kind of machine, perhaps? Mikey has been pointing this machine at the other two children like a magnifying glass. Now he’s bent over laughing, so the machine is pointing at him.

  “Go away!” Louise screeches. “Leave me alone! I hate you!”

  “Boys?” A woman’s voice cuts across all the laughter. “I hope you’re not teasing Louise again!”

  “No, Mom.” It’s Mi
key speaking. Noble can tell because he’s watching Mikey’s lips move.

  “It’s Louise’s computer time, Mikey! You leave her alone, please!” the unseen woman continues.

  “Yeah, but it’s my computer,” Mikey retorts.

  “Not right now, it isn’t.” Mikey’s mother still hasn’t appeared, though she continues to address him. “Between eleven and twelve, that computer is out of bounds to everyone except Louise.”

  The young girl sticks out her tongue. She’s standing up now, facing the two boys, but the machine behind her is still partly visible. It’s a vertical screen attached to a thin, gray, horizontal slab.

  Noble stares at this strange object in awe and disbelief. Surely, it can’t be Mikey’s computer? It’s not big enough to accommodate even a gargoyle’s tusk, let alone the whole of Morwood.

  No, he thinks. There must be some mistake.

  He’s still trying to work out exactly what he is looking at when his view of the mysterious machine is suddenly whisked away. He hears Rufus suggest, “Let’s go back to my place and post this footage.” Then the sunny room on the big screen whirls and dips and tumbles past, like a landscape seen from the back of a galloping horse. Noble watches the scene change as Mikey moves into another room. This room is just as light and airy as the first, but it’s much smaller, with lots of white cupboards. A tall, thin, balding man is stacking plates on a high shelf, while a black-haired woman stands at a counter, chopping carrots.

  “Boo!” yells Rufus. The woman cuts him a quick glance and fakes a scream. “Aaa-aaaa-aaaaah!” The man snorts and says, “Where on earth did you get that?” A black dog that’s sprawled under a wooden table suddenly scrambles to its feet, lollops over to Rufus, and starts to sniff at his kneecaps.

  Noble doesn’t recognize this dog. It’s not the white one from the photographs.

  “Are you staying for lunch again, Rufus?” Mikey’s mother queries. “I can make an extra sandwich.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We’re just going over to Roof’s place, but we’ll be back soon,” Mikey announces. “And I want peanut butter, not ham.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Please.”

  Noble is fascinated by the next leg of Mikey’s journey. It begins at a strange door that seems to be made of net. Beyond this door lies an expanse of green lawn studded with trees and surrounded by a wooden fence with a hole in it. Rufus heads straight for this hole, whooping and gibbering in a way that Mikey seems to find hilarious. Mikey also laughs when Rufus breaks wind while they’re both crawling through the hole, which exists because one wooden slat has been snapped off at the base, while another is completely gone.

  “Awww … you scumbag!” Mikey exclaims.

  “How’s that for some fresh air?”

  “Yu-uck! My face was right next to it!”

  “I know.”

  The yard on the other side of the fence is quite shady. Noble spots a cracked pathway and an overgrown garden bed before Mikey follows Rufus into a yellow house with a red roof. Then darkness falls like a curtain. At first, Noble can’t see anything up on the big screen. Gradually, however, he begins to pick out shapes and colors—a pile of paper, a handful of dirty glasses, a man on a chair who’s staring at a square of bluish light.

  “Boo!” cries Rufus, from somewhere in the shadows. There’s a brief pause. Then the man slowly turns his head and mutters, “Oh. Hi—uh—yeah.”

  “Hi, Mr. Beale. Is it okay if Rufus comes over for lunch?”

  “What? Oh, sure, Mikey.”

  “Since there’s nothing to eat here anyway,” Rufus says. And when Mikey moves away from the flickering blue light, Noble discovers that he can’t see anything. Not one thing. The picture is now just a black rectangle.

  That’s when Noble loses interest. It occurs to him that he’s spent far too much time in the audience chamber already, so he turns and climbs to the top of the stairs. Here, a door opens into a kind of large, misshapen vestibule, which contains many closed doors but no windows. The ceiling is high enough to support a big chandelier. The walls are covered in blue felt, and there’s a patterned carpet underfoot. Faint music is wafting through the air, though Noble can’t work out where it’s coming from.

  Rufus is nowhere in sight.

  Noble hesitates, wondering which door to try first. At last, he chooses one at random, pushing it open very slowly and cautiously. But there’s nothing of interest behind it—just another dingy audience chamber, full of empty chairs all facing a giant screen. Noble is about to retreat when the moving picture on this screen catches his eye.

  He recognizes Mikey even though the likeness is a poor one, unsteady and blurred and captured through what appears to be a curtain of foliage. Mikey is older than he was before. He’s just climbed out of something red and shiny that looks a bit like a van. It’s sitting on a sunlit road lined with trees and houses. As Mikey’s mother emerges from the driver’s seat, two scuffling boys climb out of a rear door and join Mikey. One boy has blond hair like Noble’s. The other has hair that’s dark and curly like Skye’s.

  They’re both about Mikey’s age.

  “Boys!” Mikey’s mother barks. “You can take your own bags in, please!”

  More doors pop open as the boys retrieve some luggage from inside the vehicle, bouncing and yelping and batting at each other like puppies. Then they move up a white path that’s been laid across a smooth sweep of lawn, their course tracked by the mysterious person holding Mikey’s machine.

  Or is it Mikey’s machine? Noble can’t tell. He only discovers who’s watching Mikey when a loud, harsh whisper suddenly fills the room.

  “I knew it was a lie. No game today, huh? Yeah, right.” There’s a long pause, filled with the sound of heavy breathing. Then the low voice continues, “Did you think I wouldn’t see you, or don’t you even care? Well, guess what? Here’s my proof. I just want you to know I’m onto you, jerk, in case you didn’t work it out already.”

  Though the voice belongs to Rufus, he’s not standing at Noble’s side, shouting into his ear. He’s up on the screen. Noble understands that the Rufus up there is muttering comments as he hides in the bushes, training his machine on Mikey. How (or indeed, why) this has been done is no business of Noble’s. Still, he’s mesmerized. It’s strange to see such a bright, cheerful, orderly homecoming being observed from such a dark, hidden place full of jealousy and anger.

  Noble has just decided that he’s looking at the yard in front of Mikey’s house when something strange happens. The picture begins to turn brown in one corner, then blacken, as if it’s been scorched. The burn mark spreads as the image itself disintegrates. Suddenly, a huge CRASH shakes the whole room.

  Galvanized, Noble darts back outside to see what’s going on. He discovers that the chandelier has dropped to the vestibule floor, spraying shards of glass and metal all over the carpet. Bits of ceiling have come down as well. A crack has formed overhead.

  “Oh, man. Here we go again,” someone remarks. And when Noble turns, he spies Rufus.

  His Rufus.

  He knows he’s found his own Rufus because Yestin, Brandi, and Lulu are there as well, huddled together in the vestibule.

  “Noble?” cries Yestin. “Hooray! It’s Noble!”

  The little boy hurries over to seize Noble’s hand, his pinched face glowing with delight. Lulu must also be pleased, because she’s jumping around like a rocking horse on springs, nearly gutting people with her horn. Even Brandi offers Noble a pallid little smile, though she looks despondent. Her hair is disheveled, her lipstick needs a touch-up, and she’s lost an earring.

  “Where’s the princess?” Yestin asks eagerly.

  “Waiting for us,” Noble replies. “Where’s Lord Harrowmage?”

  Yestin doesn’t answer. Neither does Rufus, who seems more interested in the smashed chandelier. But the others glance back at the door they’ve just passed through, their faces falling slightly—and Noble sees that Lord Harrowmage
is still skulking there in the shadows.

  The mage’s mouth is now smack in the middle of his forehead.

  Noble gasps. “What? How?”

  “He can still talk,” says Brandi.

  “I can still talk,” Lord Harrowmage confirms.

  The effect is so bizarre that Noble has to look away. “When did this happen?” he finally manages to blurt out. “And why?”

  “We don’t know,” Yestin mumbles.

  “It may be an evil spell,” Lord Harrowmage proposes sadly.

  “Hey—you know what? This is bad news,” says Rufus. But he’s not talking about Lord Harrowmage. Instead, he points at the crack in the ceiling. “We have to get out before the whole place collapses,” he observes. “How did you get in here, Noble?”

  Noble frowns. He’s about to demand a proper explanation when the floor shudders. Dust and rubble rain down from the crack overhead, which widens and lengthens until it becomes a jagged line across an adjacent wall.

  Then—bang! One of the doors falls flat on the carpet. Its hinges have just dissolved.

  Lulu immediately stops bouncing and plasters herself fearfully against Brandi’s long legs. Rufus brushes dust from his hair. Yestin squeezes Noble’s hand and confides in a low murmur, “Something’s wrong. I don’t think we should have messed with the memory.”

  Noble grunts. He’s noticed that the toppled door is now sinking through the floor, which is beginning to bubble and blister. The spreading chaos feels somehow malevolent to Noble. He remembers all the spiteful threats being flung at Mikey. Could the Kernel be right? Is Noble’s friend Rufus simply an agent of destruction? Has he been sent by his creator to sabotage Mikey’s computer as an act of revenge?

  It’s a horrifying thought, but it makes sense to Noble. There’s something profoundly, almost frighteningly logical about it.

  As Noble peers at Rufus, searching for telltale signs of malice or decay, another tremor shakes the vestibule.

  “Come on,” urges Rufus. “Let’s try this door.”