The Clockwork Ghost

by Laura Ruby

  Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Ono changed again. Every comic book and every action movie swirled in Jaime’s mind. He was sure he’d see Ono transform into some sort of fighting robot, sure he’d see Ono take on the eagles one by one. But Ono was only Ono, and it wasn’t growing but shrinking, pulling its elongated limbs back in. It was little Ono that Jaime caught in one hand.

  “Land. Kings,” Ono said. If Jaime didn’t know better, he would have thought the robot was breathing hard.

  Jaime pressed Ono into his pocket and skidded over to where Theo lay dazed. Tess was crouched next to him, pressing on his arms and legs.

  “Theo? Theo! Are you okay? Is anything broken?”

  “What?” said Theo. “No, I don’t think so. What happened?”

  “One eagle knocked you over, and another eagle caught you,” Jaime told him.

  “Caught me?”

  “Yeah.”

  All three of them turned their heads toward the ceiling. Not one, not two, but many eagles darted in and out of the shattered window, swooped and dived. Underway passengers, so sleepy and uninterested before, were screaming, throwing themselves under benches or over countertops, running in crazed circles.

  “How many do you think there are?” Tess said.

  “Twenty-two,” said Theo.

  “You counted?” Jaime said.

  “There were twenty-two eagles on the stone frieze on the front of the building,” said Theo.

  “And we woke them up,” Jaime said.

  “This isn’t going to be pretty,” said Tess.

  “It’s not pretty now,” Jaime said. “We should get out of here.”

  “Not before we get the next clue!” Tess said.

  “Maybe we need to follow the eagles like we followed Ono,” Theo said.

  “Yeah, but they’re not going anywhere in particular,” Jaime said. “They’re just flying around in circles terrifying people.”

  “They’re good at it,” said Theo.

  Right in front of them, an eagle landed with a BOOM! on sharp metal claws. They all screamed and scuttled backward. The eagle lowered its silvery head, fixed them with a gaze like some sort of fire, red and jewel-like. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! It walked toward them, the claws scratching the marble floor, the metal beak clicking.

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” they all said when the eagle emitted a metallic shriek, clicked and clicked again. When they hugged one another and squeezed their eyes shut, the eagle only shrieked louder, clicking, clicking, clicking.

  Jaime opened one eye and jumped. The eagle’s beak was only inches away, but its clicking beak wasn’t biting, the claws were not tearing.

  Jaime opened the other eye and sat up. The eagle reared back and, instead, held out one of its legs. And that was when Jaime saw something strapped there, right above the ginormous metal claw. Some kind of band or bracelet knotted to its leg. Despite his terror, Jaime leaned closer, trying to see. Someone grabbed the back of his uniform, someone said, “No!” But what if it was one of those bands like messenger birds wear; what if the eagle was trying to tell them something?

  Or maybe it was just doing a dance before it ate them.

  No, the eagles didn’t hurt Theo, and this eagle wasn’t attacking him. Jaime crawled forward reached for band. Vaguely, he heard people screaming, “Don’t touch it, man! Get away! It’s going to bite your arm off!” Jaime ignored them. When he touched the band, it felt like leather, dusty with rock. He untied it, and the eagle clicked its beak, flapped its wings, as if to say, “Finally.” The eagle launched itself into the air, crashing through the ceiling. One by one, the other eagles followed, silvery rockets in the dead of night.

  Mesmerized as they were by the eagles, it took Ono shrieking “OH NO!” to shake them out of their trance.

  Other people were starting to crawl out from under their benches, peer over countertops, pull phones from pockets to take pictures of the shattered windows and ceiling.

  “Come on, we’ve got to move,” Jaime said.

  “But we need the clue!” Tess said.

  “I’ve got the clue,” Jaime said. He really hoped he did. But that didn’t matter, because if they didn’t get out of here soon, they would be stuck here when the police showed up, and then they would wish the eagles had swallowed them all.

  “Theo,” Jaime said. “Get in between us. Put your arms around our shoulders. Pretend you’re hurt. Everybody keep your heads down.”

  They did as Jaime asked. With Theo limping between them, Jaime and Tess hobbled as fast as they could toward the stairs that led to the trains.

  “Will they still be running?” said Tess.

  “Hopefully, for the next few minutes they will,” Jaime said. “Still faster than a bus.”

  They made it to the N just as a train was pulling into the station. Down here, on the platforms, passengers were glancing curiously at the stairs, but no one was truly alarmed. Not yet. The three of them hopped on the train and slumped down in their seats, caps pulled low over their faces. No one spoke to them; no one seemed to notice them at all.

  Miraculously, they made it back to Queens before four in the morning. They climbed the stairs back to the twins’ room. Nothing seemed different, nothing had been disturbed. They emptied their pockets on the night table. Ono beeped at the various tools as if they, too, could come to life; it was a relief when they didn’t.

  Jaime, Theo, and Tess peeled off the uniforms and Tess hid them in a trunk in her closet, a trunk that had THE MAGIX written in gold along the top. Jaime reminded himself to ask her what that meant some other time.

  They got back in their respective beds and tried to sleep. Which was ridiculous, because they were all way too keyed up. Jaime had the tether or strap or whatever it was tied around his wrist like a bracelet. He traced it with his fingers. Something was tooled in the leather, some kind of code maybe, some kind of cipher. And the eagle had offered it to them, to him. Why? Because he was the first person it saw? Because it saw something in him that seemed trustworthy? But that was dumb. How could some mechanical eagle decide he was the one to take the bracelet rather than anyone else?

  Unless it somehow knew that they were the ones who had awakened it.

  The day broke cool and rainy. Bleary-eyed, Jaime, Tess, and Theo dragged themselves from bed and went downstairs, where Mr. Biedermann was making scrambled eggs and bugbacon and Lance was sitting in the corner, sulking. Jaime didn’t know a suit of armor could sulk, but then he hadn’t known that a puzzle game could turn into a robot and then a ladder and back again, or that stone eagles could be dormant for more than a hundred years until someone stopped a clock. It felt as if he were in a comic book. Living a comic book.

  Jaime pinched himself and yelped.

  Tess frowned at him, confused. He shrugged. “Just checking.”

  She nodded, as if this made perfect sense. Maybe she’d been pinching herself a lot, too.

  Mr. Biedermann held up a spatula. “So who wants bacon?”

  All three of them raised their hands; all three of them yawned.

  “Stayed up a little too late last night, I guess?” said Mr. Biedermann, scooping slices of bugbacon and putting them on each of their plates. “You can nap later.”

  Tess moved her bacon around her plate, but didn’t eat. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Where else? Work.”

  “Anything about Nine and Karl?”

  Mr. Biedermann scooped eggs onto her plate. “I’m sorry. Not yet. But she is following some leads.”

  “What leads?”

  “She wasn’t specific. You know how she is.”

  Tess took this news without changing expression, though under the table her leg started to bounce. Theo touched her arm, mouthed: Breathe. She took a deep breath, held it, let it out. The bounce quieted a bit. Not much, but a bit.

  Jaime ate his eggs and bugbacon hungrily, angrily. He didn’t know whether they should keep trying to solve the Cipher or if they should be out combing every one of the five boroughs f
or Nine and Karl. He remembered that Mrs. Biedermann was going to go out to Hoboken to interview Cricket and her family. He wanted to know what she learned.

  It was easy to convince the twins that they were better off trying to figure out the new clue—if the strap now around his wrist was a new clue—the next day, after they’d had a chance to rest.

  Tess said, “Let us come to you next time. It’s not fair that you’re the one that has to go back and forth.”

  He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t wanted them going back and forth, that if no one visited him at the new place in Hoboken, it would keep only being temporary, it wouldn’t become real. But he didn’t argue. He told her which trains to take and then headed to the place he didn’t want to call home.

  He pushed open the doors of his building at around noon to find Cricket and her brother, Otto, in the lobby. Both of them were dressed in green camo. Both were on foot—no tricycles or scooters. And both of them were inspecting every corner of the place, every nook and cranny. Cricket even had a magnifying glass. She used it to inspect the security desk. The guard, a large black man with a shiny bald head, smiled indulgently as she turned the magnifying glass on him and declared that he had a mole that he should probably get looked at.

  “Cricket,” said Jaime. “What are you looking for?”

  Cricket turned the magnifying glass on Jaime, instead, one of her eyes about the size of a baseball. “Clues,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “What kind of clues?”

  “The clue kind of clues.”

  “Okay. Can I help?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cricket, lowering the magnifying glass. “Can you?”

  Otto ran over, holding a candy bar wrapper. “Is this a clue, Zelda?”

  “Don’t call me Zelda. And no, that’s just a piece of trash.”

  “It could be a clue,” Otto insisted. “What if the person who took Karl dropped it?”

  “What if he did?” Cricket said.

  “We can dust it for fingerprints!” Otto said.

  “No, we can’t,” said Cricket.

  Otto’s face got all red, the way Otto and Cricket’s father’s did before he started yelling about something or another. “Can, too!”

  “That’s a great idea, Otto,” Jaime said. “Why don’t you let me hang on to that while you check for more clues?”

  Otto grinned and gave Jaime the wrapper. “Okay! I’m going to look by the elevators.” He dashed off.

  Cricket crossed her arms, then uncrossed them. “You are good with children,” she told him.

  Jaime made sure he didn’t crack a smile. “Thank you, Cricket.”

  “But that isn’t a clue.”

  “It’s okay if Otto thinks so. Speaking of clues, though, I’d like you to tell me again about yesterday, and when Karl disappeared.”

  “I already told everybody! And no one has found him!”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. But people are looking.”

  “LIP SERVICE,” Cricket announced loudly, recrossing her arms.

  “Not this time. This time, people really are looking. You know Tess’s cat?”

  Cricket nodded. “The big one?”

  “Yes. She’s missing, too. I think they’re connected.”

  Cricket dropped her arms. “COLLUSION. CONSPIRACY.”

  “Maybe. So do you think you could go over it again? Just for me?”

  “Yes. But I’m going to need REINFORCEMENTS.”

  To Cricket, reinforcements consisted of a grilled cheese sandwich followed by her mother’s fudge brownies and a tall glass of milk. Mrs. Moran offered lunch to Jaime, too, and he couldn’t refuse, so he ate for the second time in two hours. Ono began beeping in his pocket, so Jaime took it out and set it on the table. Otto could not stop giggling when Ono paraded across the table and said, “Oh no,” every time it reached the edge.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Moran,” Jaime said. “These brownies are delicious.”

  “You’re welcome, Jaime. It’s nice to see you again. And it was so nice of your grandmother to find us this beautiful place. I can’t thank her enough. We love it here. My husband has his own office now. And the rooms are so spacious.” Mrs. Moran raised her coffee cup, gesturing to the living room beyond. She had painted it a soft gray color, and decorated with low modern furniture in shades of burnt orange and red. Jaime had to admit the place looked good. Not sterile at all. She had always been a pretty woman—brown-skinned with large, soulful dark eyes and a short, tidy ’fro—but now she glowed like a woman in an ad for face cream. She was happy.

  At least someone was.

  But not completely. “I’m worried about Karl, though. Cricket has been devastated.”

  “What’s devastated?” asked Cricket.

  “Upset.”

  “I’m not DEVASTATED,” said Cricket. “I’m AGGRAVATED.”

  “Either way,” said Mrs. Moran. “She hasn’t been herself.”

  “I’M NOT SOMEBODY ELSE,” said Cricket.

  “That’s not what I . . . Cricket, would you like another brownie?”

  “I want another brownie!” said Otto.

  Cricket raised a brow at her brother. “You’ve had four. Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “You’re not the boss of me,” said Otto. “Why are you always pretending to be the boss? You’re too small.”

  “I am the Small Boss,” Cricket said, taking another brownie.

  Otto pounded the table. “MOM!”

  “Oh no,” said Ono.

  While Mrs. Moran soothed the kids with more milk, she told Jaime that Cricket had been out riding her tricycle with Karl as usual when she stopped to talk to the security guard. She parked the tricycle by the wall, with Karl still in the basket. When Cricket turned around, Karl was gone. He wasn’t anywhere in the building. The local police thought that maybe Karl had simply escaped out the front door or the back, but that wasn’t like him at all. He was too attached to Cricket. Plus there were always crowds of people passing through the lobby during the day, Mrs. Moran said, so anyone could have taken him.

  “I heard him,” said Cricket.

  “What, darling?” her mom said.

  “I heard Karl. He said my name.”

  “Honey, Karl can’t—”

  “HE DID. HE SAID MY NAME.” Cricket swiped angry tears from her cheeks. “What if they don’t have Cheez Doodles where he is? What will he eat? Where will he sleep?”

  “Detective Biedermann is working really hard, Cricket. And so am I,” said Jaime.

  Cricket frowned. “What are you doing?”

  Jaime thought about what the twins’ aunt Esther had said about him. “I’m doing everything I possibly can, Cricket. And so are Tess and Theo.”

  “I want to help, too,” said Cricket.

  “You are,” Jaime said. “You already have. By telling Detective Biedermann what happened yesterday, and by telling me again today.”

  Cricket got a sulky look on her face. “That’s not helping. You should make me a sheriff.”

  “A Small Sheriff,” said Otto, his mouth smeared with brownie.

  “Anything else you remember about yesterday?” Jaime asked. “Were there any unusual people in the lobby?”

  “Everyone’s unusual here. They wear weird shorts.”

  “Okay, anyone you haven’t seen around before. Anyone who seemed to be paying a little too much attention to you or to Karl?”

  Cricket thought about this. “There was one lady.”

  “What lady?” said Mrs. Moran.

  Cricket played with the brownie crumbs on her plate, arranging them in a circle. “She wore a red dress.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Karl

  If you had asked Karl, and if Karl had been able to answer, he would have told you that he had been lounging in Cricket’s basket, enjoying another Cheez Doodle, when someone had unceremoniously thrown a bag over his head, scooped him up, and carried him off without so much as a “please” or “excuse me” or
“my deepest apologies for this rude behavior.” As he bumped along in the dark, he chittered and chattered, doing his best to shape Cricket’s name with his rigid palate, but to no avail. He heard street noises—cars and Rollers and voices—and smelled the river. For one terrible moment he thought this desperado, whoever it was, was planning to toss him into the water. Instead, Karl was stuffed into a cage in the back of a van.

  At least they took the bag off his head. But the view wasn’t pleasant. There were several cages in this van. In the cage on Karl’s immediate left was a cat-sized lizard with a ruff of red fur around its neck. A rather strange-looking fellow, but it didn’t appear to be hostile. On Karl’s right, however, was . . . well. Karl wasn’t quite sure. A coyote, perhaps? But with too many legs. Far too many. Why, the creature was positively bristling with legs. And teeth.

  Karl sidled to the left and addressed the lizard. Hello, Kind Sir, he chittered. Would you mind terribly telling us where we are headed?

  The lizard turned a blue eye on him, but didn’t make a sound. Not the talkative sort, Karl guessed.

  The creature on the right, though, laughed. “Heh, heh, heh,” it said.

  Karl squished himself against the left side of his cage. Would you mind telling me what is so amusing? he chittered.

  The creature lurched toward Karl on its numerous legs. It was a deeply unpleasant thing to watch. “Heh, heh, heh.”

  Keep your distance, please, Karl said, I am in great need of personal space at this particular time, I’m sure you understand.

  The creature regarded him, tipping its furred head this way and that, just like a dog might. And then it launched itself at the bars of the cage. “HEH!”