Jingle Jangle: The Invention of Jeronicus Jangle

by Lyn Sisson-Talbert

  The robot hadn’t worked like Gustafson had hoped,

  and he had no Plan B. At least not yet . . .

  Luckily, there were still a few hours left before

  Christmas morning was upon him.

  Chapter Twenty

  Don Juan admired his reflection in a miniature paneled mirror.

  He turned to view every angle of his perfect design. “Your hair, as shiny as a stallion’s mane. Your eyes, the azul of the sea. And your buttocks like the burn of a fresh jalapeño that’s just about to pop—”

  “Do not finish that sentence please!” Gustafson reared up from his seat and loomed over the toy matador, hands splayed on his glossy desktop.

  At that moment, guards in green uniforms studded with gold buttons marched into the office and stood at rapt attention.

  “There are kids in the factory,” one said. “They’ve taken the crate with the robot.”

  “Who cares!” Gustafson growled as he sank down in his chair and threw his arms out. “It’s a failed invention! Let them have it.”

  “¡Ay! ¡Dios mío! If it were failed, then why would they be trying to recover it?” Don Juan said. “They wouldn’t!”

  Gustafson’s pout gave way to wide-eyed comprehension.

  Maestro Don Juan Diego was rarely wrong.

  “Stop them at once!” Gustafson ordered.

  Journey’s heart was as brave as it was pure.

  It was how she knew that, together,

  friends could overcome anything.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Is that the fan?” Edison’s words echoed all the way down the chute to the gusty exit below.

  “Edison?” a voice carried back up the tunnel to them.

  Edison beamed his megawatt smile. “Professor!”

  “Grandpa J!” Journey shouted over the loud droning of the fan.

  “Journey? Are you all right?” Jeronicus’s question rang in their ears.

  “Yes!” Journey answered.

  “No!” Edison said at the same exact time.

  They looked at each other.

  “Yes!” Journey yelled at Edison.

  “No!” Edison shouted over her.

  Journey jogged a few feet forward and stopped at the precipice where the tunnel’s chute opened into the darkness below. “We’re fine!” Journey called down to her grandfather. “We’ve got Buddy! We just have to get him out of here!”

  “Okay, I want you to turn back around right now! Right now! At once!” Jeronicus said. “I’ll meet you at the gate!” The blades were deadly. They had to find a way out through the packing room.

  Journey and Edison rushed back toward the crate, and halted when they noticed an eerie orange glow coming from inside the packing room. They stared at it through the grate.

  Enormous flames were eating away at the crates and barrels inside!

  The packing room had become a sparking and volatile inferno!

  Edison stared alongside Journey in terror. “Fire!”

  They raced back down the tunnel and stopped, calling into the chute.

  “Grandpa J! There’s a fire! We have to go through the blades!”

  “Journey, listen to me!” Jeronicus’s voice boomed. “You cannot go through the blades! It’s impossible! That’s impossible!”

  Journey spun to Edison, eyes sparkling. “That’s it. The square root of possible.” She shouted back to Jeronicus: “That’s it! The square root of possible!”

  “It’s just a theory!” Jeronicus hollered. “A formula in my mind! It’s not been tested!”

  “We trust you!” Journey yelled.

  Edison cupped his hands and shouted, “We don’t have a choice!”

  “It’s a theory!” Jeronicus bellowed.

  But Journey trusted in her grandfather’s theory more than anything. All her life, her mother had told her about how she and Jeronicus shared the same ability. His magic, she surmised, had been dormant for many years, but she could tell it was still there inside him. He just had to bring it back to life somehow!

  The intercom voice reverberated in the tunnel. “We’ve tracked the intruders to a fire in the East Tower! All guards report to the fire in the East Tower!” Before Journey and Edison knew it, they could hear the guards battering the bolted doors in the packing supplies room, trying to burst inside.

  Outside, Jeronicus didn’t know what to do.

  “Grandpa J, just believe!” he heard Journey cry.

  Jeronicus rubbed his hands together and took a breath, then took great care to blow on each palm. He began to write in the sky with his finger, like old times. Nothing happened.

  But then, the faintest light flickered.

  He could barely see it, but it was there, just visible enough to see.

  “Okay. Okay.” Jeronicus mustered up more of that spirit. Swiftly, he wrote out additional ratios and intervals and fractions, shifting variables around with a practiced ease. “Square root of possible. Velocity. Centrifugal force. Point of inertia,” he mumbled, speaking the formula that had begun flowing through him. The mathematical notations blazed just as brightly as ever.

  “Grandpa J!” Journey shouted down. “Hurry!”

  Jeronicus tweaked the luminous formula, moving the last symbol into place so that the calculation made crystal-clear sense to him. “The blades are moving at five hundred revolutions per hectosecond!” he shouted into the tunnel. “You’ll have to get caught in the current of the blades, which will sync with the speed of the crate and the path of inertia! You have to enter at a thirty-five-degree angle, at exactly fifteen hundred feet per minute! You will make it through!”

  “Okay, Grandpa J!” Journey called out. “I love you!”

  And then, as if by a Christmas Eve miracle, she heard the same words echoed back, but this time it wasn’t just an echo. “I love you too, Journey!” Then he added: “It is possible!”

  In the tunnel, she smiled then ran to the crate. “Let’s go!” she said, trying to turn it.

  Studying it, Edison had an idea. He pulled the rope out from the bottom of the dolly.

  Journey shook her head at him, puzzled. “Edison!” What in the world was he doing?! “We don’t have time for this! There’s a fire!” She could hear the guards kicking down the doors of the fiery packing room, which sent out a burst of heat into the tunnel as something in the room exploded. Edison screamed as the flames reached out into the tunnel like serpents.

  “We have to go!” Quickly, Journey pushed the crate as Edison harnessed the rope around the front of the box to create a steering wheel of sorts. He grabbed the front of the crate, and with Journey pushing it from the rear, they moved it toward the chute together.

  Edison hopped on first, with Journey leaping up onto it behind him.

  “Just for the record, this is not a good idea!” he yelled, sitting like a sleigh driver gripping the reins. The crate pitched down the tunnel, drifting side to side as they screamed, the wheels of the dolly underneath swiveling wildly.

  Then the crate plummeted down the chute just as a fireball erupted after them.

  Edison steered it this way and that down the slanted incline, the fireball hot on their tail.

  “This is so cool!” Journey shouted gleefully, as if they were on a jolly sleigh ride.

  “This is not cool!” Edison shrieked as the crate did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree loop. “This is dangerous!”

  Journey saw that they were heading toward support beams. “Duck!”

  They leaned forward and pressed against the crate, narrowly avoiding the beams.

  Edison glanced back at Journey. “That was close—”

  “Edison, watch out!” She pointed ahead at a steaming pipe.

  Edison jerked the rope, sending the crate swerving sideways to circumvent it.

 
Looking over their shoulders, they could see the flaming fireball was gaining.

  “It’s getting close!” Edison screamed. “This is crazy!”

  “Edison, you just have to believe!” Journey shouted.

  He nodded. “There’s no logical reason that I should, but I do. I do!”

  The wheels of the careening dolly began to screech.

  “You have to slow us down!” Journey told him.

  “We can’t slow down!” he replied.

  “Buddy!” Journey shouted, hoping—no, believing—he could wake to help them.

  Just then, the crate glowed with a warm light.

  In the next instant, Buddy’s metal arms broke through either side of it, elongating and extending out to drag against the chute’s tiles, slowing them down in a shower of sparks.

  “How is he doing that?!” Edison remarked in a mixture of joy and fear.

  The chute leveled out. They could see the blur of blades ahead, whipping louder and louder. There was no turning back. They saw Jeronicus standing beyond the blades, arms up.

  “You’re going too fast! Thirty-five degrees!” he warned.

  Journey believed that Buddy would know exactly what to do.

  The robot used his arms to strenuously launch them into the air.

  Leaning back and flattening out, Journey and Edison screamed as the crate sailed in a perfect thirty-five-degree angle toward the big spinning blades, the white-hot flames licking at their necks . . .

  They kept screaming and clinging to the crate for dear life.

  And then, like magic, they were safely through.

  Journey and Edison had believed in the impossible.

  And for the first time in a long time,

  so had Jeronicus.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The crate arced through the air, landed in the snow, and skidded to a stop.

  Edison was knocked forward and fell facedown in the snow with a grunt. At the same time, the jet of fire erupted out of the tunnel and through the fan as Jeronicus dove to the side.

  Journey dismounted the crate and ran to her friend. “Are you all right, Edison?”

  He held out a thumbs-up. “I’m okay!” he groaned, starting to rise.

  Just then, Jeronicus hobbled over. “Journey! Journey!”

  She beamed and ran to him. “Grandpa J!” She hugged him, and he hugged her back. “Grandpa J, your formula,” Journey said, not letting him go from their embrace. “It worked.”

  Edison dusted himself off and came running over. “Professor!” He stopped short. “I came up with a steering mechanism made up of rope that got us through the tunnel alive,” he said, sounding proud—and a bit winded.

  “Well done, Edison,” Jeronicus told him. “Quite the inventor!” They were words that Jeronicus may not have been capable of uttering when he’d had a different apprentice under his tutelage. They were also the words that Edison had been waiting to hear his whole short life.

  Edison’s eyes shimmered and he joined their hug. “Just like you,” he said softly.

  Ms. Johnston rushed out from around the corner and stopped at the sight of them.

  Jeronicus gawked. “Mrs. Johnston?”

  “A good postal woman always ensures a safe delivery.” She reached out her arms. “Children! Jerry! Come on!” She started to run, then spun back to them. “I’ll get the truck! You get the crate!” she assigned.

  Jeronicus, Journey, and Edison happily followed her around the corner.

  Within minutes, the mail truck rumbled off, slipping and sliding its way across the snowy suspension bridge. Was that Journey’s very active imagination, or had she gazed out the window in the back of the truck to spy a tall figure stepping out from the factory’s main gate into the night?

  * * *

  Soon, the truck was careening down Chancer Street, with Jeronicus shouting for townspeople taking late-night Christmas Eve strolls to get out of the way, headlights illuminating their shocked faces, until it buckled to a jarring stop in front of Pawnbroker. Jeronicus hopped out and ran around to the back of the truck, opening the doors to discharge Journey and Edison. Then he and Ms. Johnston heaved the crate from the truck. Journey held the shop door open as they carried it inside, and she followed in after them with Edison on her heels.

  “Edison!” a voice called from down the shadowy lane as his foot touched the stoop. “Time to come home! It’s getting late!”

  He froze, slouched, and turned from the shop. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to spend the last shred of Christmas Eve with his mother, but that a small part of him wanted to spend it with the Jangles more—especially because he wanted to watch Jeronicus see Buddy powered up and in action for the first time.

  “Edison, come on!” Journey emerged back on the stoop. “We’re about to put Buddy together.”

  He strode to her, jabbing his thumb behind him. “My mom’s calling me, so I’ve gotta go.”

  “Thanks for helping me rescue Buddy. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  He took a breath. “We both know that’s not the case, but thanks for saying it anyway.”

  They shared a smile.

  And then he took off as Journey gave a wistful little sigh and reentered the shop.

  “Journey, I really, really do like you!” Edison called back. “A lot. Bye!”

  At the sound of his confession, she ran back outside and watched him jogging down the lane, vanishing around a bend, where he crashed into something and shouted out in pain.

  “Ow! I’m okay!”

  Journey laughed and shook her head. Classic Edison. She was glad they were friends, and that he’d found his inner fearlessness. She’d known he’d had it in him. He just needed a push.

  Jeronicus and Ms. Johnston stepped outside to join her.

  “Grandpa, now you won’t have to close the shop!” She darted past him inside.

  Jeronicus was finally alone with Ms. Johnston. “Thank you,” he told her. “Though I don’t know why you came back.” He followed her to her mail truck.

  She turned to face him. “Because you’re a good man,” she said. “Stubborn. Ornery.” She chuckled and slid into the front seat. “Could benefit from a good haircut, a new set of clothes, but . . . still good.” She smiled out the window at him. Then she looked down at her hands on the steering wheel. “Jeronicus . . . I know about losing things. But the magic isn’t just in what you’ve lost. It’s in what you still have.”

  For a great thinker, he’d never thought of it that way before.

  She revved her truck’s engine to go.

  “Mrs. Johnston.” He corrected himself. “Ms. Ms. Johnston.” He looked into the truck. “Oh,” he said delighted. “Look what I found here.” He pulled out her clump of mistletoe. “I forget how you use these,” he added with a nervous glance.

  They both regarded it for a long moment.

  “It’s been so long.” He lifted it over her hat. “I think you place it over someone’s head, like so,” he said softly, “and lean in for a kiss.”

  Ms. Johnston looked to him and she chuckled, closing her eyes and leaning in.

  Then he tilted through the window and pecked her on the cheek. “Like so.”

  She kept her eyes shut, savoring the moment.

  “Ms. Johnston?” he asked. “Ms. Johnston? Can you hear me?”

  After several seconds, her face broke into a grin.

  “I’ll— I’ll keep the mistletoe,” he said quietly once she’d zoomed away in a dreamy haze.

  * * *

  Jeronicus stepped back into the shop and watched Journey open the crate.

  The Buddy 3000 poured from it in pieces. Metal plates. Screws. Gears. And cogs.

  Apparently, the strain on the robot to decelerate Journey and Edison in the chute and to get them perfectly angled throu
gh the blades had been more than his tiny body could bear.

  Journey fumbled with the bits of metal, her face falling, desperately trying to solve how to put them back together. She spied the robot’s glass heart among the scrap pile and carefully lifted it.

  “Grandpa, you have to fix Buddy,” she urged Jeronicus. “You have to make him work again. Please.” She handed the cube to him. She knew he could do it.

  Wordlessly, he sat at the counter and turned it over.

  Minuscule cogs poured onto the table.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can,” Journey protested. “You’re the greatest inventor of all! You can do anything! It’s why I came here. I had to see it for myself.”

  “You’re here because your mother wanted you here. It’s what she wrote in her letter.”

  “Because I wrote her one from you saying the same thing.”

  Jeronicus craned his head up at her. “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “All she ever talked about was how magical this place was, and that you could see things that nobody else could!” Journey blinked earnestly. “Like I can.”

  He studied her. So, she fabricated the letter just to facilitate meeting him.

  “Everywhere I’ve ever been, I’ve felt out of place. This is the only place where I finally felt like I belong.” She looked at her cracked red boots, hanging her head.

  Jeronicus tilted her chin to look up at him. He was glad she’d found her way to him in the end, no matter the means, and that she’d helped him find his way back to himself. “Journey, a child with imagination always belongs. Never be afraid when people can’t see what you see. Only be afraid if you no longer see it. Okay?”

  She nodded solemnly, and they shared a heartfelt embrace. “I love you, Grandpa J.”

  * * *

  Long after Journey had gone to bed, Jeronicus carried the Buddy 3000 into his dimly lit workshop and carefully placed the robot’s broken little body onto his worktable. It was time to get to the repairs, and to show his granddaughter when she woke up on Christmas the next morning the full extent of who her grandfather could truly be. He hunched over the table, clicked on his lamp, and polished Buddy’s metal plates. He selected tools from his old smock then shrugged into it. It still fit.