Seventeen
When they got to Ashford House, the driveway was empty. A dark car was parked across the street, and a man sat in it—but his head was tilted back, and he didn’t move at all while they crouched in the trees, watching. Asleep.
A few lights shone inside on the ground floor, but no one moved in the windows. They sneaked around the back, just in case the man out front woke up, then propped their bikes against the house so they could go through the kitchen door. Eleanor shut the door with a soft click and they moved down the hall in silence, except for the creak of floorboards. It might give them away, but at least they’d hear anyone else coming, too.
“I don’t think the January Society is inside,” Otto whispered. “If they just set a guard out front, they must not think we’ll come back.”
“It does seem pretty foolhardy of us,” Eleanor admitted, hoping that meant it was actually unexpected and clever.
Then she realized that no one was there. It was breakfast time, and Jenny and Ben should have been in the kitchen, but even though the lights were on, it was empty. Eleanor felt her heart beat all the way down in her toes. What if they’d gotten hurt? What if they’d gotten taken?
There was a note on the kitchen counter. The writing was sloppy and big.
Going to hospital. Everything ok.
BABY TIME
—Be
He’d been in such a hurry he hadn’t finished writing his name; it just ended in a flat line with a tiny bump on it. Eleanor let out a relieved breath. They’d probably hurried out without thinking to wake her up. They must have gone before the January Society showed up. Good. They’d be safer at the hospital.
“They should be safe there,” Otto said, echoing her thoughts while reading over her shoulder. She nodded, glad he understood what she was thinking. “Where should we start?”
“Back at the clock?” Eleanor suggested.
They trooped upstairs, Pip carrying an armload of snacks she’d liberated from the kitchen.
The clock stood right where they had left it, which Eleanor supposed wasn’t so surprising. But something had changed.
The clock’s hands now ran the usual way. It displayed the correct time, and the second hand tick-tick-ticked ahead clockwise. As they watched, the minute hand thunked forward.
“I never thought a clock working normally would be so spooky,” Otto said, and the others made noises of agreement.
Tick tock tick, said the clock.
“What did the cat-of-ashes say, exactly?” Otto asked.
“Something about Bartimaeus Ashford having a huge ego, and hiding things all over. And she said that everything in the house has a purpose,” Eleanor said.
“Huh,” Otto replied, which was about all that Eleanor had come up with. “Let’s look around the house. There has to be something that can help us.”
They set to work. They looked in the bedrooms along the hallway one by one, opening every drawer, peering behind doors, even checking behind paintings and mirrors. Drop cloths covered most of the furniture, turning the couches and dressers and chairs into lumpy ghosts, and a thick layer of dust coated everything else. Jenny and Ben couldn’t afford the staff to keep the whole huge house clean, so they left most of it closed up. In hibernation.
They found old books and old clothes and a set of lawn darts and an ancient game of Boggle, but nothing that seemed to suit their purpose. They worked their way down to the second floor, where Ben and Jenny’s bedroom was, and then to the first floor again. In the great room Otto read the spines of all the books on the shelves. About half of them were Ben and Jenny’s. The other half had come with the house and had titles like A Treatise on the Uses of Deadly Flora in Folk Remedies and Practical Mycology and Rare Birds and Where to Find Them.
Pip collapsed onto the big cozy chair by the fireplace and propped her feet up on the ottoman. “This is useless,” she said, picking at a loose thread on the arm of the chair. “This place is too big, and we have no idea what we’re looking for.”
Eleanor had stopped in front of the fireplace. The huge stone fireplace, big enough to walk right into, and the staircase behind it. A staircase that led up to nothing. “Everything in this house has a purpose,” she said. “But what’s the purpose of a staircase that just leads to a wall?”
She led the way through the empty space where the fire was supposed to be set and up the short flight of gray stone steps. They weren’t tall enough to reach the second floor of the house; if they had connected to anything, it would have been halfway between the first floor and the second, but they ended at a blank stone wall instead.
“Is there anything on the other side?” Otto asked, knocking on the stone with his ear against it.
“No. There’s a little room on the other side on the ground floor, and one of the second-floor bedrooms above that, and in between there’s just a normal amount of wall. There isn’t room for anything else,” Eleanor said.
“But there must be something here. Otherwise it doesn’t have a purpose,” Otto replied, and began to feel carefully along the wall, stone by stone. “Hold on. What’s this?” Otto fitted his fingers under a groove at the edge of a stone and pulled. It swung away on tiny hidden hinges.
The false stone hid a keyhole. It was a big keyhole, five inches tall. You’d need a very, very big key to fit it.
Eleanor bent down and peered through the keyhole. She could see a room on the other side. The light didn’t go very far, but she could make out the dark shapes of shelves and other furniture and floorboards that matched the rest of the house.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “There’s no room for a room. And that one’s huge.”
“Normal physics and geometry are just suggestions in Eden Eld,” Otto said, sounding pained.
“How do we get in?” Pip asked.
“With a key,” Eleanor said. “A very big key.” She remembered what she’d thought the first time she saw the clock. The pendulum looked like the end of a fancy key. “I have an idea. Wait here.”
ELEANOR OPENED THE glass door and watched the pendulum swing back and forth. She didn’t like the idea of stopping it; it made her skin prickle, like the ticking clock was all that was keeping the day moving forward, from midnight to midnight. But she took a deep breath and put out her hand.
The pendulum hit her palm and stopped at once. The clock fell silent. She waited for something horrible to happen, but the house was as quiet as ever. Quieter, without the ticking of the clock.
She wrapped her fingers around the pendulum. She wiggled it. Jiggled it. It moved up and down more than she expected, and carefully she began to shift it back and forth and up and down. The mechanism was definitely attached to something, but it was like it was hooked there, not like it was held there by nails or screws.
Something clicked in the depths of the clock, and the pendulum slid free into her hands. She grinned.
The end of the pendulum had been carved like a key.
The whole thing was about three feet long and made out of some kind of pale wood. The teeth of the key, five of them, were carved with patterns like brambles and flowers, giving them a wild, lacy texture.
Otto and Pip were waiting downstairs, but Eleanor didn’t run back just yet. She stood with the key in her hands, balanced across her palms, and savored the moment. She’d figured it out. She was clever, like the cat-of-ashes said. She could beat this. She could win this. She could save them.
The key felt warm in her hands. She wished, more than anything, that her mother was here to see her and know what she’d done. What she’d figured out.
Her smile faltered. She tightened her grip on the key and gave a grim nod.
She didn’t need anyone to see her and be proud of her. All that mattered was saving her friends.
She went back downstairs with heavy steps. As she walked toward the living room, she got faster and faster, feeling lighter and lighter. By the time she reached Otto and Pip at the top of the staircase, she was smiling again.
“You got it?” Otto asked.
“I got it,” Eleanor replied. She lifted the giant key to the lock.
It slid in with a satisfying click.