Alexa held her breath until everyone emerged from the blinding light pouring through the door. Only then did she finally relax. They’d made it! They were home!
The trip into the yellow world had been fun at first, but there had been something nasty lurking out of sight. Something bad. And right at the end, right after Aunt Gladys had shown up to rescue them, Alexa had felt Something Bad stepping out from the shadows….
But now they were all safely back home, and everything was okay. Content, Alexa flung herself into the room’s only chair—a fun, swivelly chair in front of the long bank of old-timey computers—and proceeded to twirl around back and forth, the repetitive motion helping her calm down.
Aunt Gladys was last through the door, and she quickly slammed it closed behind her. The loss of the bright white light cast a momentary darkness until Alexa’s eyes re-adjusted to the dim illumination coming from the lightbulbs scattered around the room.
“Well!” exclaimed the constantly flustered woman. “That was…! Is everyone…? We’re all here? Zorro? Everyone’s back?”
“Yes, Aunt Gladys,” reassured Zack. “We’re all back.”
Alexa giggled. She liked how Aunt Gladys always got their names wrong.
“How did you get us out of there?” asked Sydney.
“How did I…? How did you…!” The giggle died on Alexa’s face as Aunt Gladys flipped from harmless and funny to furious and parental in a heartbeat. “What possessed you to…! So dangerous! You could have…! I’ll never forgive myself!”
“I knew it was a bad idea!” piled on Janice, which Alexa felt was unfair, since it had been her idea in the first place.
“What just happened?” asked Zack. “Where were we?”
“The American Revolution!” exclaimed Janice. “We were actually there!”
“No!” insisted Aunt Gladys, crossing to the bank of computers. “Well, yes. But no. Definitely not.”
“What was that sound? That creature?” asked Sydney.
That was the Something Bad, thought Alexa. Duh.
“I don’t know,” answered Aunt Gladys. “I don’t want to know. You don’t want to know. Forget you saw it.”
“We didn’t see it—we heard it,” reminded Sydney.
“Forget you heard it. In fact, forget your entire trip,” suggested Aunt Gladys as she scurried around Alexa and started adjusting knobs and buttons. “Oh! Yes. Excellent idea. This was all a dream. Nighty-night.”
“I can’t believe you built a time machine!” said Sydney, following her aunt. “An actual time machine!”
Aunt Gladys snorted a laugh and whirled back around. “Time machine? Of all the…! Don’t be silly!”
“It wasn’t a dream,” insisted Zack, backing his sister up. “We were there. We were in the American Revolution.”
“Nope, nope, nope.” Aunt Gladys’s fingers flew over the immense machine, turning knobs and flipping switches. “You were most certainly not in the American Revolution.” A single glass bulb at the top of the machine suddenly blazed bright red, and Aunt Gladys punched a big, round button sitting apart from the other controls. There was the sound of gears straining, followed by a deafening CRACK!
The four children turned to see the magical door they’d just ventured through snapped in half by the strange metallic frame in which it was fastened. All sparks of blue energy vanished, and silence hung in the room.
“You were in a memory of the American Revolution,” finished Aunt Gladys.
Alexa tilted her head, trying to figure out what Aunt Gladys had meant. It didn’t work. “A memory?” she asked.
“The butler’s, I think,” continued Aunt Gladys, walking past her dazed nieces and nephew to the now-broken door. “He seemed to be everywhere.”
The four children looked from one to another, each hoping someone else understood what she was talking about. None of them did. “How…” began Zack, proceeding carefully. “How is that even possible?”
“Possible?” Aunt Gladys unfastened the latches connecting the door to the frame. “You went through the door. Butler’s door, butler’s memory. I don’t fully understand. Don’t have to. Hook up the door. Push the buttons.”
She yanked the broken door free and let it clatter to the floor. “Forgot to shut down yesterday,” she continued, stepping over the debris and approaching a pile of fresh doors stacked one on top of another. “Worried about Alice’s…what’d you hurt? Knee?”
“Ankle.” Alexa didn’t bother reminding Aunt Gladys that her name wasn’t Alice.
“I was distracted,” admitted Aunt Gladys. “I get distracted.”
“You don’t say,” muttered Sydney. Zack shot her a look. She shrugged at him.
“Came in here to shut down. Door was wide open. You didn’t even have a knob! Well, I had to…I had to! So I went in. So much darker. My poor dears! If anything had happened…!” She shook her head sadly. “All my fault. I couldn’t live…I wouldn’t live…My fault.”
She stopped suddenly and looked up, as if seeing them for the first time. “Heavens! Bedtime! You can’t be here! This never happened! Shoo! To bed with you!”
“Are you kidding?” asked Sydney. “Aunt Gladys, this”—she spun in a circle, taking in the entire room—“this is incredible!”
“No, it’s not. It’s scary,” corrected Janice. “And dangerous. Not something we should mess around with. Right?”
“Absolutely. Jake is right. Very dangerous. But also wonderful,” agreed the flighty woman with a pinch of pride, smiling. Then the pinch disintegrated and the smile morphed into a frown. “But so dangerous. You could have…you all could have…”
“How does it work?” asked Alexa as the tiniest beginnings of an idea began to form.
“Work? I hook up a door. To the frame. Work the controls. Just like Father taught me. Then—”
“Your father?” interrupted Zack. “Did he build this?”
“Yes. My father. Your grandfather. Marcus Tulving. Brilliant man. Ahead of his time…” She stared longingly at the central doorframe contraption before whispering so softly Alexa could barely hear her. “I will find you, Daddy.”
“Um…Aunt Gladys?” prompted Zack.
She blinked and was suddenly herself again. “Yes. When you open a door—a wooden door—you leave a bit of yourself behind.” She pulled a fresh door off the top of a stack and hauled it to the platform. Alexa wondered why Aunt Gladys didn’t ask Zack or Janice to help, then wondered why Zack or Janice didn’t offer to help Aunt Gladys. She’d help, but the door looked heavy.
“A small bit. Tiny. Insignificant,” continued Aunt Gladys between grunts of effort. “But it’s there. Open the door enough times, it…imprints…on you. Not the right word. Doesn’t matter. Hunnngh!” She shoved the final grunt out while heaving the door into a standing position on the platform next to the frame.
“Every door?” asked Sydney.
“Every wooden door.” Aunt Gladys carefully set the new door into the metal frame and began adjusting fasteners and latches to secure it. “Wood is organic. Used to be alive.” A few more moments of fiddling and everything snapped impressively into place.
“But why does it work?” asked Zack.
Aunt Gladys turned and leaned back on the newly secured door. “Why? Don’t know. Your grandfather could explain. Or your mother. She was always…”
“Mommy?” asked Alexa, perking up.
Aunt Gladys shook her head clear. “Not me,” she said, ignoring Alexa’s interest in their mother. “I was never the…Well, anyway.”
Sydney took a step forward, mesmerized by the machine. “You just open this door and enter someone’s memory? Just like that?”
“Yes. No! Not just like that! There are rules! Memory hopping is incredibly dangerous!”
“Memory hopping?” asked Alexa.
Aunt Gladys looked over at Alexa. “My own term, little Alphonse.” Alexa rolled her eyes. “Yes! Rules! Safety precautions! Checklists!” She marched down off the platform and back to the bank of computers.
“First rule is simple. When you go in, make sure you can get out. Bring a doorknob.” She reached down and pulled open a drawer filled with doorknobs of all shapes and sizes. “I like to use nice crystal ones. They’re pretty. But any knob will do. From here. From now. It’s your ticket home. Stick it on a door in the memory. Boom! Instant gateway home.”
Alexa chuckled at Aunt Gladys’s use of the word boom.
“I don’t understand,” said Zack. “You say we were in the butler’s memory.”
“That makes the most sense, yes.”
“But how? He couldn’t remember us—we’d never met him. We weren’t even alive.”
“You weren’t there, Zippy. You were in a memory. Who’s hungry? I’m famished.” Aunt Gladys made a beeline for the ugly curtain.
“I’m confused again,” announced Alexa, looking to her siblings for help.
“Don’t worry,” muttered Sydney. “I think Aunt Gladys is, too.”
Their aunt ducked under the curtain, then poked her head back through. “Doesn’t anybody else want Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings?” she asked.
“It’s kind of late for cereal,” said Zack.
“Not in France,” responded Aunt Gladys, tapping her finger against her forehead for no apparent reason before ducking back out of the room.
The four Rothbaums stared at the curtain as it swayed back and forth in the wake of their aunt’s passing.
“She’s not all there, is she?” said Sydney.
Alexa giggled and hopped off the swivelly chair (though not before spinning around one final time). “I think she’s fun,” she announced.
“Fun?” asked Janice. “Alexa, we could have died in there.”
“But we didn’t,” insisted Alexa.
“But we could’ve,” repeated Janice.
“But we didn’t,” repeated Alexa right back. “And Sydney got her shoe back.”
She pointed at Sydney’s feet, and her three siblings were shocked into silence to find the shoe right back where it belonged. Then she sighed, bored of the conversation. “I’m hungry.” She headed to the door.
“Hold on, Alexa,” said Zack. “We need to find out what’s going on. We need answers.”
Alexa stopped, turned back, and put her hands on her hips in her best imitation of Sydney’s “serious” pose. “And who else besides Aunt Gladys has them?”
“Father had a theory,” explained Aunt Gladys while pouring five bowls of cereal. “New worlds…new dimensions. Bubbles of reality. All from memories in the doors. He was right. Father was so smart.” She emptied the cereal box, set it aside, and reached for another one.
“So we were in one of these new bubble worlds?” asked Zack.
“Exactly, Zubin! See? You’re smart, too.”
“But…but…” Alexa struggled to form her thoughts clearly. “But we saw the butler. He saw us. We changed what happened.”
“You changed the memory, not the reality.” Aunt Gladys opened the new box and finished pouring. It was more a single pour over the five bowls rather than five separate pours, resulting in quite a bit of cereal spilling onto the counter. “You can’t change the actual past. You can change what we remember about the past. Eat! Eat!” She shoved the bowls across the counter at the children.
Alexa looked down excitedly at her bowl, then paused. “What about milk?” she asked.
“Milk? Yes. Very good for you,” said Aunt Gladys. “I approve.”
“We need some in our bowls,” said Sydney.
“You do? You do! Oh!” Aunt Gladys rose and bounced to the refrigerator.
“Why don’t I take care of that, Aunt Gladys?” offered Zack. Alexa, remembering how well Aunt Gladys had poured the cereal, thought that was a good idea.
“Oh! Thank you, Zeus.” She leaned across the counter to whisper conspiratorially to Alexa. “Such a nice boy, don’t you think?”
Alexa shrugged and plopped some dry Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings into her mouth.
“You can actually change what people remember?” asked Janice nervously.
“Oh, yes!” Aunt Gladys shifted gears so fast Alexa nearly got whiplash. “That’s the danger. Of memory hopping. That’s why my doors are old. Old doors mean dead people. Like that nice butler. Long dead. Who cares if we change their memories? They’re dead. See? A little more, Zebulon,” she said, motioning for Zack to fill her bowl to the rim with milk. “Better. Perfect! Right. I have work to do.”
She grabbed her bowl and stood.
“It’s four-thirty in the morning!” said Janice, pointing at the clock.
“Is it? Well, I’m up. You go back to bed. First eat, then bed.” She stood awkwardly for a moment, as if waiting for something. Finally, she shrugged and sashayed around the counter toward the doorway leading to the massive steel door.
A thought popped into Alexa’s head. She considered ignoring it at first because she was enjoying her Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings, but it wouldn’t go away. “Aunt Gladys?” she asked just as the flighty woman reached the doorway. “Why did you break the door?”
Aunt Gladys’s feet froze in midstep, once again a split second before the rest of her body, causing her to lurch forward like a dizzy mime. She threw her arms against the sides of the doorway to steady herself before addressing Alexa’s question. “Every time someone enters a memory, it…sours,” she explained. “Soon…you don’t go back in. Not good. Not good at all.”
She peered at each of them in turn, nodding to herself, then turned and hurried down the hallway.
“Come on, guys,” said Zack, pushing his untouched bowl of cereal away. “Let’s go back to bed.”
Nobody argued. Alexa shoved one final, sloppy spoonful of Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings into her mouth and hopped off her stool, beaming with excitement. She understood now what Mommy wanted.
Somewhere in the house was Grammy’s door. She just needed to find it.