by Morgan Rice
“You did great today,” Ms. Belfry told him as she placed all of her little models into her bag. “Are you okay getting home?” She looked concerned about his welfare.
Oliver nodded to reassure her. “I’ll get the bus with everyone else,” he said, realizing as he did that that might mean enduring a journey with Chris. He shuddered.
Oliver swung the strap of his backpack over his shoulder and followed the rest of the school kids outside. The sky was so dark, it was practically black. It felt very ominous.
Head bowed, Oliver started walking toward the bus stop. But just then, he caught sight of something behind him, something far more scary than a black tropical storm cloud: Chris. And running alongside him were his cronies.
Oliver turned and bolted. He headed straight toward the first bus in the queue. The bus was crammed with kids and clearly ready to leave. Not even checking to see where it was going, Oliver threw himself onboard.
Just in time as well. The mechanism hissed and the door shut behind him. A split second later, Chris appeared on the other side, glowering menacingly. His cronies drew up beside him and they all glared at Oliver through the door, which was really nothing more than a thin shield of protective glass.
The bus set off, moving Oliver away from their fierce faces.
He peered out the window as the bus moved away and began picking up speed. To Oliver’s dismay, Chris and his cronies barged their way straight onto the bus waiting behind. It, too, pulled away from school, following closely.
Oliver gulped with dread. With Chris and his friends just one bus behind, he knew that if they saw him get off, they would too. Then they’d pounce and he’d be in for a pummeling. He chewed his lip with worry, not knowing what to do next. If only his invisibility coat really existed. Now was the time to use it!
With a huge crack, the sky seemed to open. Rain cascaded down and lightning streaked across the sky. So much for an hour before it hit, Oliver thought. The storm was already upon them.
The bus wove perilously along the road. Oliver gripped the metal pole and bumped shoulders with the kids standing around him. Things had gone from feeling ominous to feeling suddenly quite scary.
Another bolt of lightning jagged across the sky. Kids on the bus yelped out in fear.
Oliver realized then that perhaps he could use the storm to his advantage. Since getting off at his own stop was out of the question with Chris’s cronies watching on, he’d have to get off unexpectedly. Blend in with the crowd. And with the pounding rain and general disorientation, that might just be possible.
At that exact moment, the bus slowed to a halt. A large group of kids surged forward for the door. Oliver looked around and saw they were just on the outskirts of the good neighborhood, which appeared to be where the majority of Campbell Junior High pupils lived. Oliver didn’t know the neighborhood particularly well, but he had a vague idea of where it was in relation to his own.
So he followed the crowd, hopping off the bus at an unfamiliar stop. Rain lashed down on him and the others. He tried to stick with the crowd, but to his despair, everyone dispersed in different directions, and quickly too, to escape the weather. Before Oliver could even blink, he was left standing on the sidewalk completely exposed.
Not even a second later, the second bus pulled into the stop. Oliver saw Chris through the steamed up window. Then Chris clearly saw Oliver, because he started pointing excitedly and shouting something to his friends. Oliver didn’t need an interpreter to know what Chris’s gesticulations meant. He was coming for him.
Oliver ran.
He didn’t have much of an idea where he was, but he ran anyway, heading in what he was certain was the vague direction of home.
Without looking behind, Oliver ran and ran. The rain and wind beat him, making it hard going, but this was one of the few occasions where being small was an advantage. Chris would struggle to drag his lumbering body around, Oliver knew, whereas he was sprightly.
But, Oliver realized, Chris wasn’t his only problem. All his friends were with him. The girl in particular was a very fast runner. Oliver stole a glance over his shoulder and saw that she was gaining on him.
Oliver passed some stores, then turned into an alleyway leading to their back streets. He dodged and weaved through obstacles such as abandoned shopping carts and empty boxes that had been swept up in the winds.
Then he rounded a corner. For a brief moment, he was out of sight of the approaching bullies.
As a strong blast knocked over a garbage can, Oliver had a sudden burst of inspiration. Without a moment’s hesitation, he leapt inside the can, crawling over rotten food and empty wrappers until he was completely out of sight. Then he curled into a ball and waited.
The girl’s feet appeared on the strip of sidewalk he could see. She stopped and paced in a full circle, as if looking for him. Then Oliver heard more pounding footsteps and saw that she’d been joined by Chris and the other cronies.
“Where did he go?” he heard one of them shout.
“How did you lose him?” came Chris’s distinct voice.
“He was here one second and gone the next!” the girl yelled back.
Oliver stayed very still. His heart was hammering and his limbs were shaking from all the exertion.
“He’s done one of his spells,” Chris said.
In his stinky, shadowy trash can, Oliver frowned. What did Chris mean?
“That’s so creepy,” the girl said. “You mean he made himself disappear?”
“I told you, didn’t I?” Chris replied. “He’s some kind of freak.”
“Maybe he’s possessed,” one of the boys said.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Chris shot back. “He’s not possessed. But there’s something wrong with him. Now do you believe me?”
“I do,” the girl said, but Oliver noticed that her voice was coming from farther away.
He peered to where her feet had been and saw they’d now disappeared from sight. Chris and his cronies were leaving.
Oliver waited. Even after their disparaging conversation about him faded to nothing, he didn’t want to leave the safety of the trash can. There was still a chance one of them was waiting, just in case he was about to reveal his hiding place.
Soon, the rain started to really come down. Oliver could hear it pounding heavily against the metal trash can. Only then did he accept that Chris would definitely have left. Even if he did want to beat Oliver up, he wouldn’t stand in the pouring rain in order to do it, and Oliver was quite certain his cronies wouldn’t be convinced to either.
Finally deciding he was safe, Oliver started to leave the trash can. But just as he wriggled toward the front of it, a huge gust of wind started up. It battered him right back inside. Then the wind must have changed direction, because suddenly Oliver felt the can lurch beneath him. The wind was so strong, it was making him roll!
Oliver gripped the edges of his metal prison. Filled with terror, disorientated, he started to go round and round and round. He felt sick with panic, sick from the motion. Oliver willed it to end soon but it seemed to go on and on. He was thrashed about, jerked around.
Suddenly, Oliver’s head thunked the side of the trash can very hard. Stars appeared in his eyes. He closed them. Then everything went black.
*
Oliver’s eyes fluttered open and took in the sight of the spherical metal prison around him. The spinning motion had stopped but he could still hear the roaring sound of the storm all around him. He blinked, disorientated, his head pounding from the blow that had knocked him out.
He had no idea for how long he’d been unconscious but he was covered in stinking garbage. His stomach swilled with nausea.
Quickly, Oliver shuffled toward the front of the can and peered out. The sky was dark and rain lashed down like a sheet of gray.
Oliver scrambled out of the trash can. It was freezing and it took barely seconds for him to become soaked through. He rubbed his arms in an attempt to get some warmth into them. Shive
ring, Oliver looked around, trying to discern his location.
Suddenly it dawned on him where he was, where the can had rolled him to during the storm. He was at the factory! Only this time, Oliver noticed, there were lights glowing inside.
His mouth fell open. Was he seeing things? Maybe he’d gotten a concussion from the blow to his head.
The rain continued to lash against Oliver. The lights in the factory glowed like some kind of beacon, drawing him to it.
Oliver hurried forward. He reached the grass around the factory, and it squelched beneath his feet, turned swampy from the downpour. Then he skirted around the side of the warehouse, trampling on the ivy and nettles in his haste to get to the back door, to shelter. He found the door just as he’d left it; ajar, and just wide enough from him to squeeze through. Quickly, he did, and found himself in the same darkened room, with the same smell of dust, the same echo of abandonment.
Oliver paused, relieved to be out of the rain. He waited for his eyes to adjust. Once they had, he saw that everything was just as it had been last time he’d been here, with dusty, cobwebbed machines disused and in disrepair. Except…
Oliver noticed a very thin, straight yellow line running across the floor. Not paint, but light. A shard of light. Well, Oliver knew that a shard of light needed a source, and so he hurried to it, following it like it was a trail of breadcrumbs. It ran all the way up to a solid brick wall.
How bizarre, Oliver thought as he stopped and pressed his fingers against the wall. Light isn’t supposed to travel through objects.
He fumbled around in the dim light, trying to work out how light could pass through a solid object. Then suddenly his hand touched something different. A handle?
Oliver felt a sudden surge of hope strike him. He heaved the handle and jumped back as a huge creaking noise sounded out.
The ground shook. Oliver wobbled, attempting to stay upright as the very ground moved beneath his feet.
He was turning. Not just him, but the wall too. It must have been built on a turntable! And as it turned, a huge shard of golden light burst out.
Oliver blinked in the sudden, blinding brightness. His legs felt unsteady beneath him from the motion of the turning floor.
Then, no sooner had it started than the movement stopped. There was a click as the wall found its new position. Oliver staggered, this time from the sudden deceleration.
He looked about him and was stunned by what he saw. He was now standing in a whole new wing of the factory. It was filled with incredible, fantastical inventions! Not the cobwebbed, creaking, rusted relics from the warehouse before, but instead, floor to ceiling, as far as the eye could see, stood bright, gleaming, new, ginormous machines.
Oliver couldn’t help himself. Filled with excitement, he ran up to the first machine. It had a moveable arm that spun right over his head. He ducked just in time, and saw the hand on the end of the arm deposit a boiled egg into an egg cup. Just beside it, two disembodied automaton hands bounced along the keys of a piano, while beside them a very large brass clockwork metronome ticked out the beat.
He was so preoccupied and delighted by the inventions around him, Oliver didn’t even notice the strange bowl-shaped item from yesterday, nor the man tinkering away with it. It was only when a clockwork cuckoo took flight, making him stagger backward and bump straight into the man, that Oliver even became aware that he was not alone.
Oliver gasped and spun on the spot. Suddenly he realized who he was looking at. Though many years older than the picture in his book, Oliver knew he was staring into the eyes of Armando Illstrom.
Oliver gasped. He couldn’t believe it. His hero was really here, standing before him, alive and well!
“Ah!” Armando said, smiling. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Oliver blinked, stunned by what he was seeing. Unlike the dusty, cobwebbed part of the factory that existed on the other side of the mechanized wall, the factory this side was bright and warm, glistening with cleanliness and brimming with the signs of life.
“Are you cold?” Armando asked. “You look like you’ve been in the rain.”
Oliver’s gaze flicked back to the inventor. He was shocked to actually be standing face to face with his hero. Even as the seconds ticked by, he was completely tongue-tied.
Oliver tried to say, “I have,” but the only sound that came from his throat was a garbled kind of grunt.
“Come, come,” Armando said. “I’ll fix you up a hot drink.”
Though unmistakably the Armando from his inventors book, his face had been ravished by time. Oliver made some quick calculations in his head; he knew from his inventors book that Armando’s factory was up and running during World War Two, and that Armando himself had been a young man of barely twenty years old during the factory’s heyday, which meant he had to now be well into his nineties! He noticed for the first time that Armando had a walking stick to support his frail body.
Oliver began to follow Armando across the factory floor, the lighting too dim for him to work out what exactly the large shadowy shapes around him were, though he suspected they were more of Armando’s glorious inventions, working ones, unlike those on the other side of the mechanized wall.
They went down a corridor and Oliver was still unable to really believe that any of this was real. He kept expecting to wake up any moment and discover this was a dream caused by him knocking his head in the trash can.
Making matters feel even more fantastical and unreal to Oliver was the factory itself. It was designed like a rabbit’s warren, a labyrinth filled with doors and arches and corridors and stairs, all leading away from the main factory floor. Even when he’d walked the entire external perimeter of the factory the previous day he hadn’t noticed anything odd in its architecture, no signs of external staircases and the like. But the factory itself was so huge, he reasoned, that from the outside it just looked like an enormous brick rectangular prism. No one would guess from the outside how the interior was designed. Nor would anyone expect it. He knew Armando was supposed to be zany, but the way his factory was structured was downright bizarre!
Oliver glanced left and right as he walked, seeing through one door a huge machine that resembled Charles Babbage’s early prototype computer. Through another door was a room with a steepled roof, like a church, and a mezzanine level, upon which, directed toward a huge glass window, was a row of enormous brass telescopes.
Oliver continued following the doddery inventor, his breath continually catching in his throat. He peered into another room they passed. It was filled with eerily human-looking automatons. Then the next contained an entire military tank, which was mounted with the strangest-looking weapons Oliver had ever seen.
“Don’t mind Horatio,” Armando said suddenly. Oliver jumped, breaking once again from his reverie.
He looked about him for the so-called Horatio, his mind conjuring up all kinds of machines that may have earned the name, until he noticed a sad-looking bloodhound lying in a basket by his feet.
Armando continued speaking. “His arthritis is worse than mine, poor thing. It makes him very grouchy.”
Oliver gave the dog a quick glance. Horatio sniffed the air as he passed, then settled back down to sleep with a weary sigh.
Armando hobbled stiffly into a small kitchen area, leading Oliver in after him. It was a modest space and very messy; the sort of kitchen you’d expect of a man who’d put the last seventy years of his focus into inventing zany machines that didn’t work.
Oliver blinked under the flickering fluorescent lights.
“Do you like tomato soup?” Armando asked suddenly.
“Uh…” Oliver said, still too tongue-tied to actually speak, to even really comprehend the fact that his hero was offering to make him soup of all things.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Armando said, smiling kindly.
Oliver watched him fetch two cans of soup from a cupboard whose door was barely still on its hinges. T
hen he took a contraption from a drawer that resembled a can opener in design but was so big it required two hands to operate.
“There’s a reason why they say there’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” Armando said with a chuckle when he noticed Oliver’s curious expression.
Finally the cans were open and Armando set to work simmering the soup in a pot on the little gas hob. Oliver found himself completely frozen, unable to speak or even move. All he could do was stare at this man, at the real, living, breathing version of his hero. He even pinched himself a couple of times just to make sure. But it was real. He was really here. Really with Armando Illstrom.
“Please sit,” Armando said as he came over and placed two bowls of soup on the rickety table. “Eat.”
Oliver at the very least could remember how to sit down. He took his seat, feeling very odd indeed. Armando lowered himself slowly into the seat opposite. Oliver noticed the misty quality in his eyes and the patches of discolored skin on his face. All the telltale marks of old age. When Armando laid his hands on the tabletop, all his finger joints looked red and swollen from arthritis.
Oliver’s stomach growled as steam from the soup wafted into his face. Even though he was so shocked and befuddled by everything, his hunger drive took over, and before he’d even had time to think, he’d grabbed his spoon and taken a huge mouthful of hot, flavorful soup. It was very tasty and nourishing. Far better than anything his parents ever cooked. He took another spoonful, not even caring that the soup was burning the roof of his mouth.
“Nice?” Armando asked encouragingly, eating his own soup at a much slower pace.
Oliver managed to employ a modicum of restraint and paused between mouthfuls to nod.
“Hopefully you’ll warm up soon,” Armando added, kindly.
Oliver couldn’t be sure if he meant warm up from the chilly rain or warm up socially. He hadn’t really said much since he’d gotten here, but he was so muddled from the storm, then so surprised to see Armando in the flesh, that his faculty for speech had completely failed him!