The Clockwork Ghost

by Laura Ruby

  Karl tried to scramble backward, but couldn’t move any farther away. Furry legs poked through the spaces between the bars, trying to reach him. At the end of each leg was a long, curved claw. One of them swiped only inches away from Karl’s nose. The creature kept this up—the laughing, the launching, and the swiping—the whole ride. It was perfectly traumatic.

  So it was quite a relief when the vehicle stopped moving and the doors opened. Two men in white coats and heavy gloves hefted the cages and carried them into a strange building that smelled of cleaning solutions and something else. Deeper and more frightening. It smelled like the coyote with too many legs. It smelled like many coyotes with too many legs.

  Karl yearned for a Cheez Doodle. He yearned for his comfortable bed with his favorite hand-crocheted afghan. He yearned for Cricket.

  He and the other animals were taken into a large white room with other cages. He was placed on a shelf. One of the men opened the door of the cage and held Karl still as the other hooked a water bottle to one of the bars. A bowl of kibble was tossed in the corner, and a blanket was placed along the bottom of the cage. Then the door was shut. The men marched out of the lab and left the various creatures to themselves. The many-legged coyote kept up its insane laughter, and some of the other animals howled and burbled and yipped. A rainbow-striped octopus methodically tossed all the rocks from its aquarium onto the floor while a monkey-faced bird yelled, “SOS! SOS! SOS!” over and over. Karl pulled the blanket over his head to try to drown them out, but it didn’t work. By the time the lights in the lab came on again, Karl was more exhausted than he’d ever been and hungry enough to eat the strange kibble that got stuck in his teeth. He was wiping his lips with his little hand when another man arrived, this one skinny with rather bulbous eyes. The man peered at Karl through the thin bars of the cage.

  If Karl hadn’t known better, he would have thought the man’s gaze was . . . hungry. As hungry as some of the other creatures that populated the cages.

  “Hello, there, Karl,” the man said. “I’m very pleased to meet you, finally.”

  The man held up a syringe.

  Karl was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tess

  Tess’s dreams were filled with giant eagles smashing through windows, darting through clouds. She dreamed she was on the back of one of the eagles, riding it to somewhere safe. But where was that? The safe place? She didn’t know, but she hoped the eagle did.

  She woke up the way she had for the last week, with Theo slumped by the side of her bed. She didn’t say anything about what he was doing, and neither did he. She didn’t know what to say about it. She hated that he felt he needed to do this for her; she hated that she needed it from anyone. She hated that Nine was gone and she was starting to adjust to life without her. That seemed to be the most horrible thing of all, that you could lose something so precious to you, something you loved, and still go on. Grandpa Ben would have said that life itself was about loving and losing and loving again, despite the risks, but she had lost Grandpa Ben, at least in a way, and she didn’t want to lose any more. She hated that she would never be able to stop it.

  She touched Theo’s shoulder and he stirred. He yawned, stretched, and got up from the floor as if sleeping by your sister’s bed was the most normal thing in the world, as if it was something that all brothers did. He got in the shower first so she went downstairs to forage for breakfast, as all the adults would already be out of the house. She didn’t have to forage, though, because Lance had taken it upon himself to whip up a fresh batch of oatmeal cookies. They were as good a breakfast as any, so she helped herself to four of them, which seemed to please Lance. (Granted, it was difficult to tell when a suit of armor was pleased, but Tess thought she detected a bit of a spring in Lance’s step when she reached for another cookie.) By the time Theo came downstairs, she had devoured a half dozen all by herself. Theo did the same, and then stuffed more into a bag for Jaime.

  After Tess showered and dressed, they left the house to Lance and the giggling spiders, and headed for Hoboken. Tess was excited to see Jaime’s new place. She knew that he wasn’t happy with it, that his building in Hoboken was strange to him, stranger even than Aunt Esther’s house in Queens. It had taken him weeks—and the onslaught of twenty-two mechanical eagles—just to invite them.

  As Jaime had suggested, they took the N train to the PATH train that ran underneath the Hudson River to New Jersey. The previous night’s rain had cooled the air, so when the twins burst from the train station, the sun was shining brightly on bars and restaurants and brownstones. They followed Jaime’s directions to his building, finally arriving at a tall bank of condominiums that faced the bright blue ribbon of the Hudson. It was a beautiful building, but unlike their beloved 354 W. 73rd Street in Manhattan, this building was only a year old. The stone outside was white and sparkling. The lobby smelled of new carpet, the walls of fresh paint.

  At the security desk, Tess asked the smiling guard for Jaime’s apartment, and the woman happily rang Jaime.

  “I have a Bess and Thom Friedman for you,” the guard said. “Bess and Thom.” Her eyes flicked to Tess and Theo, assessing. “Yes, she has a braid. And his hair is a little big. Great! I’ll send them up.” The guard rang off and pointed to the elevators. “Eleventh floor,” she said. “And have a nice day!”

  “Thank you,” said Tess. “You too.”

  Theo grunted, and punched at the elevator buttons.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tess said.

  “Bess and Thom?”

  “It was a mistake, that’s all,” said Tess.

  “She’s too cheerful,” Theo said. “Everything about this place feels weird.”

  “It’s new.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “I know,” Tess said.

  At this, Theo seemed even more grumpy and stabbed at the elevator buttons again.

  “You know that doesn’t make the elevator come any faster,” Tess said, and smiled. It was Theo’s usual line.

  “I know it doesn’t,” Theo said, stabbing away. “I bet this elevator only moves up and down.”

  “You said that the old elevator was a waste of space. That the reason it could move every which way was because the elevator shafts took up so much room.”

  Stab, stab, stab. “Yeah, but I also said it was cool.”

  “Okay,” said Tess. She was twitchy enough without all this punching and stabbing, but she didn’t complain. He couldn’t have slept well slumped next to her bed. He couldn’t have slept well all week. She was used to getting only a few snatches of sleep a night, but it was a new thing for Theo.

  Theo was right, the elevator only went up and down. They made it to Jaime’s floor in one quick minute, and barely felt the elevator’s movement. The elevator doors opened up onto a large hallway that also smelled of fresh paint. The solar glass on the hall window was clear as the very air. Tess recalled how the wavy old solar glass of 354 W. 73rd Street fractured the light into rainbows, and missed her old building so much that it hurt. She clutched her chest and Theo stopped walking.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, not fine, but what was there to do about it?

  They knocked on Jaime’s apartment door and Jaime’s grandmother let them in. She was wearing coveralls much like the ones they had worn as a disguise their last few outings. But hers had the words THE HANDY WOMAN embroidered on the front pocket and written on the back.

  She grinned at them. “Tess! Theo! Why has it taken you so long to visit me?” She gathered both of them into a hug. She smelled of something sweet, like jam, and also something woody, like oak. As if she had been cooking up a batch of marmalade while carving wands for wizards.

  She led them inside the apartment. It was a large apartment, with a big open space that housed the kitchen and living room. Everything was white. The cabinets, the countertops, the walls. The few pieces of furniture that they had brou
ght from their old place appeared small and worn in this brand-new space. They hadn’t purchased anything new themselves. They hadn’t painted. There were a few photos on some of the tables, but most must have been packed away, still. It was as if this place were staged instead of lived in.

  Jaime’s grandmother knew what they were thinking, the way she often knew what children were thinking. “We’ve been too busy to decorate,” she told them. “One day we’re going to paint everything.”

  “It’s a very nice place,” said Tess.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Jaime’s grandmother. “But maybe it will be. Someday.”

  “Someday,” Jaime said, walking down a long hallway from where the bedrooms must have been. “Hi.”

  Theo handed him the bag of cookies. “A Lance special.”

  “Thanks,” Jaime said. “You guys want a drink or something?”

  “Maybe later,” Tess said.

  “Speaking of later,” said Jaime’s grandmother, “I’ll see you later. I have a packed schedule today. Lots of jobs all over the place.” She kissed Jaime’s cheek, and then Tess’s and Theo’s. “I’m glad to see you both. There’s lunch in the fridge. Keep an eye on this boy for me. And don’t do anything silly while I’m gone.”

  Since everything they’d done for the last few months could be considered silly or dumb or even life-threatening, they all merely nodded as Jaime’s grandmother disappeared out the door.

  “Well,” said Jaime. “You want to see my room? It’s about as thrilling as this one.”

  They followed him down the long hallway, which was as conspicuously absent of photographs as the living room was, and into a huge bedroom that faced the river.

  “This view is amazing,” said Tess.

  “Hmmm,” Jaime said. He fed his hamster-hogs. One of them jumped on her wheel and ran furiously. “I don’t think Tyrone likes it, either,” Jaime said.

  “How would she decide?” Theo asked.

  “She’s very decisive,” Jaime said.

  Tess sat in Jaime’s desk chair. On the desk itself, a sketchbook lay open. The pages were filled with sketches of the same woman in various outfits: armor, unitard, cargo pants, etc. Tess turned the page and found the woman wearing a plain gray coat that fell around her ankles.

  Tess tapped the picture. “I like this one best so far.”

  “Me too,” said Jaime. “But it’s not right. Not yet. I’m working on it.”

  Theo sat on Jaime’s bed. “So about the clue.”

  Jaime unwound the leather strap from his wrist. “I looked at it this morning but I don’t know what it means.”

  He laid the strap on the bed. Tooled vertically into the leather, making one long strip, were these characters:

  Jaime had copied the letters into his sketchbook horizontally:

  EhhhxrleeeHedrcSodehlmsoriuapnbdelibreiltlosnpautttole

  “I figure it’s the German word for ‘Ach, this clue is going to give you a giant pain in your neck’ or it’s some sort of transposition cipher,” he said, “but I didn’t get much by using some of the tools on the web.”

  “There are some capital letters interspersed,” Theo said.

  Jaime wrote down the capitals: E H S. “Hmmm. I don’t think that helps.”

  Tess tugged at her braid, let go. “Okay. Can I have a piece of paper, Jaime?”

  They each took a stack of sheets and tried different arrangements of the letters. After a while, Tess lost herself in the work. That was what her grandpa Ben liked about puzzles—that you could forget yourself and your troubles for a while as you tried to solve them. Tess remembered when she was very small, only about four, sitting at her grandparents’ kitchen table, legs swinging back and forth, doing her best to work the very first crossword puzzle ever invented. But it wasn’t her grandpa Ben who had introduced her to crosswords, it was her grandma Annie. Though Grandma Annie didn’t much care for the Morningstarr Cipher the way Grandpa Ben did, she did love her crossword puzzles.

  “Arthur Wynne developed this puzzle more than a hundred years ago,” Grandma Annie told Tess. “He called it a ‘word-cross.’”

  It wasn’t like any crossword Tess had ever seen. This one was shaped like a diamond:

  2-3. What bargain hunters enjoy.

  4-5. A written acknowledgment.

  6-7. Such and nothing more.

  10-11. A bird.

  14-15. Opposed to less.

  18-19. What this puzzle is.

  22-23. An animal of prey.

  26-27. The close of a day.

  28-29. To elude.

  30-31. The plural of is.

  8-9. To cultivate.

  12-13. A bar of wood or iron.

  16-17. What artists learn to do.

  20-21. Fastened.

  24-25. Found on the seashore.

  10-18. The fibre of the gomuti palm.

  6-22. What we all should be.

  4-26. A day dream.

  2-11. A talon.

  19-28. A pigeon.

  F-7. Part of your head.

  23-30. A river in Russia.

  1-32. To govern.

  33-34. An aromatic plant.

  N-8. A fist.

  24-31. To agree with.

  3-12. Part of a ship.

  20-29. One.

  5-27. Exchanging.

  9-25. To sink in mud.

  13-21. A boy.

  Tess pointed at the squares. “I got 10–11. That’s dove. And 24–25. That’s sand. And I got F–7. Face! Also, 16–17. What artists learn to do. Draw! But I can’t figure out the rest. It’s hard, Grandma.”

  “You just figured out one more.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve discovered the answer to 18–19. ‘What this puzzle is.’”

  Tess looked at 18–19, saw that there were four spaces. She wrote h-a-r-d. “This puzzle is hard!”

  “See? You’re doing great,” said Grandma.

  Grandpa Ben, who had been reading through a batch of yellowed papers, looked over at the puzzle. “Oh, that thing. One of the clues is wrong.”

  “You always say that,” said Grandma. To Tess, she said, “Ignore him, dear.”

  “Wait, which one is wrong?”

  “Look at 22–23,” Grandpa Ben said.

  Tess read, “An animal of prey. That’s an animal that other animals like to hunt, right?”

  “What do you think?” said Grandpa.

  Tess wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like thinking about animals hunting animals.

  “A deer?”

  “What did I tell you?” He shook his head at Grandma Annie. “You’re just confusing the girl.”

  “She’s not confused.”

  “The answer is lion,” said Grandpa Ben. “But a lion is a predator, not prey.”

  “The dictionary defines ‘beast of prey’ as a carnivorous animal,” Grandma Annie said. “And anyway, a lion could be prey either way.”

  “Prey to what?” said Grandpa Ben.

  “A bigger lion,” Tess suggested.

  Grandma and Grandpa both laughed, and Grandma reached for Grandpa’s hand. That was how she remembered Grandpa Ben and Grandma Annie. Always laughing, reaching for each other, even when they disagreed.

  After Grandma Annie died five years ago, they sat shivah. Though they weren’t formal people, Tess’s mom covered all the mirrors with black cloth, and they had visitors coming and going, bringing food and talking in low tones. Tess sat under a table and cried so hard she ran out of tears. Grandpa Ben gathered her onto his lap. He said that he hurt, too, but their pain was a measure of how much they loved Grandma Annie and how much joy she had brought them. He said he wouldn’t trade his time with Grandma for anything, not even to stop his tears. And he said that he would try to laugh as much as he could, because that was how Grandma lived her life, and that was how he could honor her.

  Tess hadn’t felt like laughing much lately, but she thought that working this part of the Cipher honored her grandmother as well as her grandpa Ben. She
pushed her papers away and focused on the leather strap itself. Something about the way the letters were tooled onto the leather nagged at her. Why were they vertical instead of horizontal? Why make a long strip of letters rather than tooling the letters across the strip so they could be read more easily? Were they supposed to read the letters differently somehow? Arrange the strip in a particular way?

  Jaime tossed his pencil down, removed his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Your headache is catching, Tess.” He put the glasses back on. “I liked this thing better as a bracelet.”

  “It would make a nice belt, too,” said Theo.

  “A belt?” Tess said, her thoughts racing, scratching for some bit of history. Who wore leather belts tooled with ciphers?

  “What are you thinking?” said Theo, watching her.

  “I know how to read it,” Tess said.

  “You do?”

  “Yup. We just need someone with a bigger arm.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Theo

  “Wait, what’s wrong with my arm?” Jaime said.

  “No, no, no,” Tess said, “there’s nothing wrong with your arm, that’s not what I meant,” but Theo knew what she meant. A long time ago, Grandpa Ben had told them of a method of encryption used by the ancient Greeks and the Spartans during war. They would wrap a strip of parchment or leather around a wooden rod of a certain circumference, write a message across the strip, and then unwind it from the rod. A messenger would carry the parchment strip or wear the leather strip as a belt, with the back side of the leather facing out, hiding the writing. The resulting cascade of characters on the strip would look meaningless until the recipient wrapped it around a rod of the same size. Only then could you read the message.

  “We don’t need an arm, we need a scytale,” said Theo.

  “Or an arm,” said Tess.

  “Tyrone communicates more clearly than you guys do,” Jaime said.

  Theo explained how the cipher worked, that the rod used in the encryption method was called a scytale. “S-c-y-t-a-l-e. Rhymes with Italy.”

  “So I had the right idea wrapping the strap around my wrist,” said Jaime. “The fact that it was wrapped around the eagle’s leg was probably a hint.”