“I am too going,” Sydney stated defiantly, placing her hands on her hips and leveling her best glare at her brother.

“It’s too dangerous,” argued Zack. “We don’t know what’s on the other side of that door.” He pointed emphatically at the rather dull-looking wooden door that the children (along with Dimitri and a rather confused Aunt Gladys) had found strapped into the brass doorframe when they entered the central room of the house. It had been taken as a given that this was the last door Aunt Gladys had ventured through before heading to bed the night before. They figured whatever had happened to erase her memory must lie waiting on the other side.

“You’re right. We don’t know,” agreed Sydney. “Which is why going in alone is stupid.”

Zack frowned. Sydney knew she’d scored a point and inflated with confidence. Normally, she’d just rely on her stubbornness and the threat of a violent outburst to get her way, but in this case she was further buoyed by the fact that, near as she could tell, she was actually right.

“She has a point,” confirmed Janice. “Going in alone might not be the best idea.”

“Aunt Gladys has been going in alone for years,” Zack pointed out.

“And look how well that turned out,” snapped Sydney. “Look, Aunt Gladys can’t go, Alexa can’t go, Janice doesn’t want to go, and you need Dimitri here.”

Dimitri gave a hesitant wave from his seat at the controls. It had come as somewhat of a shock to the children when the happy-go-lucky door delivery man had confessed to having worked as Marcus Tulving’s assistant a number of years previously. It was not quite clear exactly when he’d stopped working for their grandfather—Dimitri wasn’t saying and Aunt Gladys no longer had a clue—but he knew how to work the memory machine. Sydney found it odd that the only clearheaded adult in the room was letting the kids take charge, but the quirky strongman was proving almost disappointingly timid and was more than happy to follow the children’s lead.

“Fine,” relented Zack. “Come with me. But stay close and don’t run off. Deal?”

Sydney stuck out her hand. “Deal.” She smiled as Zack groaned and met her hand with his own, obviously finding the act overly dramatic.

Preparations were quickly made, limited though they were. Sydney picked a doorknob out of the drawer—a particularly girlish one just to annoy her brother—and they each grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from a basket Janice had discovered against the wall. Sydney tried to think of what else they might need but came up empty.

Finally, she stood next to Zack at the foot of the platform. Although no one had said anything, there was an unspoken agreement to remain on the floor until Dimitri had the memory machine up and running.

“Whenever you’re ready, Dimitri,” said Zack.

“Yes. Am working on it,” said an obviously stressed Dimitri. He frantically twisted dials back and forth, pulled levers, and pressed buttons seemingly at random while Janice hovered over his shoulder. “Has been while. Am bit rusty.”

“You already pressed that button,” mentioned Janice, obsessively following his every movement.

“Is good button!” snapped Dimitri.

“I don’t understand,” complained Aunt Gladys for the umpteenth time. “The door’s just…shouldn’t it…you know…? Be on a wall?”

Sydney was surprised to find herself deeply saddened by her aunt’s comment. She became more determined than ever to walk through the door and make things right.

“When will we know if it works?” asked Alexa. “Will Aunt Gladys be back to normal as soon as you leave?”

“Good question,” agreed Zack. “Do you know, Dimitri?”

“Yes?” he asked, looking up from the computer bank. “Sorry, am concentrating. You have question?”

“He asked how it works,” repeated Janice. “They’re going into a memory of the past, right? So as soon as they go in, they’ll be who knows how many years before now. So anything they change then would change instantly now, no matter how long it took them to change it then. Right?”

Everyone just looked at Janice.

“Did I say that right?” she asked.

“Not a clue,” admitted Sydney.

“Does not work that way,” said Dimitri. “Is not then. Is there. You spend hour there, is hour here. See?”

“I’m confused. Where is there?” asked Aunt Gladys.

“What I think Dimitri is trying to say—” started Zack.

“I remember!” interrupted Dimitri, swiveling back around to the computers. “Is this one!”

He twisted a dial that looked like any other dial, and the machine sprang to life with a mechanical cough, followed by an electric sizzle, followed by an unidentifiable sound from somewhere below. In a flash, bright blue sparks of energy wrapped themselves around the door. The entire frame buzzed excitedly for a moment before settling into a quiet drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence.

The moment past, Sydney embarrassingly removed her hand from Zack’s, where it had unconsciously gone an instant before. What are big brothers for, anyway? she reasoned.

“Oh my,” murmured Aunt Gladys in awe.

“Is good! You go now!” announced Dimitri, rather unnecessarily.

Zack looked down at Sydney. “You ready for this?” he asked.

“Quit stalling,” she replied with a wicked gleam in her eye.

They stepped up onto the platform. Zack reached his gloved hand out and gingerly touched the doorknob amid the sea of crackling blue energy. When his hand wasn’t zapped into cinders, he shrugged, grabbed the knob, and pulled the door open.

They walked unflinchingly into the white.

“Huh,” said Sydney.

“Huh,” agreed Zack.

Brother and sister emerged from the whitewash of tingling fuzzy-headedness and found themselves in a dingy, dusty, dimly lit room packed with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves as far as the eye could see. Each shelf was filled to bursting with all manner of objects, papers, boxes, and assorted knickknacks—each tagged and labeled and evidently shelved according to some chaotic system wholly incomprehensible to the naked eye. So tightly packed were they that an overabundance of seemingly useless junk littered the floor, clogging the aisles. Through the insufficient level of light coming from the sparsely placed lightbulbs high above, Sydney was again able to make out a faint yellowish film covering the world.

“It’s a warehouse of some kind,” said Zack, or as Sydney liked to think of him at times like these, Captain Obvious.

“A warehouse of useless, boring junk,” specified Sydney.

She was surprised when her brother snickered in response. “Looks like it,” he said. “Come on. Let’s find Aunt Gladys.”

Sydney let him lead the way through the minefield of garage sale rejects, taking care to avoid stepping on anything breakable. “What do you think she was doing here?” she asked quietly, skirting around a stack of important-looking papers. “You know, to make her forget everything?”

“I don’t know,” Zack admitted, stepping over a ceramic bowl. “Hopefully we’ll find out.”

Hopefully we won’t make the same mistake, thought Sydney, ducking under a long spear sticking out across the aisle from the shelf next to her. The thought of losing her memory terrified her. She couldn’t imagine not knowing her sisters and brother, forgetting her old home, her old friends.

Forgetting Dad.

Her father’s face appeared in her mind’s eye, smiling in that hapless, reassuring way he had, and she had a sudden, urgent need to run up and bury her face in his arms. Zack did the best he could, but when things were really bad—like, say, now—nobody could compare to Dad in his ability to make everything okay. Without him, she didn’t see how things would ever be okay again.

Sydney was jolted out of these morbid thoughts when she stumbled into a suddenly frozen Zack. “Hey! What are—”

Her brother quickly shushed her and pointed. At first, all she could see were endless aisles of junk, but then she spotted two figures up ahead. Standing as silent as possible, she was able to make out voices.

“—truly remarkable discovery!” said a small, young man in an excited, high-pitched tone. “I am aghast to think it was down here all this time!”

“Yeeeeeees. Old Stickwell will be beside himself,” agreed an older, more disheveled man in an equally excited voice, rubbing his hands together like a greedy miser.

Four or five aisles away, two men in tweed were hunched over a large, wooden crate, fawning at something within. Bits of straw and splinters of wood littered the ground at their feet.

“This will make our careers!” exclaimed the young man.

“What are they talking about?” whispered Sydney, but Zack just shrugged.

“Yeeeeeees. We get to name it, of course,” said the older man.

His colleague lit up. “My parents will be so proud! Let’s call it a Wicklesfeltonasaurus! Our names will go down in history!”

Sydney snorted at the absurdity of the name before she could stop herself. The sound reverberated outward in an ever-expanding circle, filling the entire room with an audio eye roll. Both men immediately looked up.

“Did you hear that?” asked the small, young one, who was either Wickles or Felton—Sydney had no way of knowing.

“Yeeeeeees,” replied the older, disheveled one, who was either Felton or Wickles. “You’re certain we’re alone?”

Sydney held her breath as the two men peered into the gloom in their general direction. She prayed her habitual disdain had not proved their undoing.

“Perhaps it was nothing,” said either Felton or Wickles very slowly.

“If it was nothing,” responded either Wickles or Felton, reaching into the crate. “Then it won’t mind if we bash its head in.”

A shiver ran down Sydney’s spine as the man pulled a large, wicked-looking bone out of the crate and hefted it like a club.

“Yeeeeeees. An excellent idea,” agreed either Felton or Wickles, reaching into the crate to procure his own Bone of Serious Bludgeoning.

“We should get out of here,” whispered Zack. “Do you have the doorknob?”

Sydney nodded and backed away, keeping her eyes glued on the two men, who were slowly edging down their own aisle. She was thankful there were multiple shelves of junk between them.

Suddenly, she stepped backward onto a shard of pottery with an audible crack. Everybody froze.

“Got you!” cried either Wickles or Felton. He swung his bone into the row of shelving in front of him, smashing it aside with a blow far more tremendous than a man his size ought to have been able to make.

“Run!” yelled Zack.

Sydney took off, Zack at her heels. Behind them, the sound of utter destruction filled the room as the two men used their prized discovery to create their own aisle through the rows of ancient shelving.

As she approached the door—the same boring wooden door that now stood hooked up to an impossible memory machine back home—Sydney fumbled in her pocket for the knob and tried to remember how Aunt Gladys had said the trick worked. Did she just hold the knob up to the door? Did she have to attach it somehow? Did it attach itself magically? Panic swelled within her, punctuated by the crescendo of chaos chasing them. Her fingers found the knob and she pulled it out of her pocket.

“Duck!” screamed Zack from behind.

Acting on instinct, Sydney dropped to the ground as an impossibly large and just-as-impossibly real claw flailed above her head, crashing into the shelves and ripping them to shreds.

“What was that?” cried Sydney.

Instead of answering, Zack shoved her down another aisle. “Move! Move!”

She pounded her feet as hard as she could, still clueless as to the nature of this new threat. Whatever it was, it was big, and the floor reverberated with its plodding footfalls.

“Zack?”

“Keep running! Don’t look behind you!”

Unfortunately—and utterly predictably—Zack’s warning caused Sydney to look behind her. What she saw drained the color from her face. A mostly complete skeleton of a horrific-looking dinosaur (Sydney assumed it was a T. rex) roared with fury as it swung its claws back and forth, tossing the shelving aside in its desire to hunt down the fleeing children. The only thing keeping it from overtaking them was the fact that one of its legs was missing some bones, forcing it to shamble forward and drag that leg comically behind it. Sydney screamed all the same.

“I told you not to look behind you!” reprimanded Zack.

“It’s a dinosaur!”

“No, it’s the skeleton of a dinosaur!”

“We’re being chased by the skeleton of a dinosaur!”

“I noticed!”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her forward as the dinosaur skeleton brought its good leg down practically on top of her. Finding her feet, Sydney ran with Zack down the aisle, only to skid to a stop as the two bone-wielding men appeared in front of them.

“Oooh!” said either Wickles or Felton. “Time to bash!”

“Yeeeeeees,” agreed either Felton or Wickles.

The two men raised their bone clubs high, a look of pure evil twinkling in their eyes.

Suddenly, they were knocked aside by a large stone pillar swung at them from behind. They crumpled to the ground to reveal a huffing, puffing, grinning, wizened old man. Their savior dropped the stone pillar—which looked far too heavy for him to have lifted let alone used as a baseball bat—and gestured to the children.

“This way!” he said. “Quickly!”

Another beastly roar from the dinosaur skeleton spurred them on, and they followed the strange man down one aisle and up the next.

“Where are we going?” asked Sydney as they ran.

“Does it matter?” answered the old man.

They turned a corner and came to a small alcove at the back of the warehouse.

“We’re trapped!” worried Zack.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” said the old man. “Trapped? Me? Bah!” As he rushed toward what looked like a giant furnace, Sydney realized two things. One, he wasn’t faded and yellow like everything else in this memory. And two, she recognized him.

“Hey!” she began. “Didn’t we—”

Ignoring her, the old man yanked the door of the furnace open. “Get in! Hurry!”

“Inside the furnace? Are you crazy?” asked Zack.

The floor shook with the approach of the skeletal T. rex.

“Most likely! Hurry!” urged the old man, gesturing toward the door. Within was not the red-hot fire and coals one would expect to find in a furnace, but complete blackness.

“What’s in there?” asked Sydney.

“Gluttonous gum balls, just go!” yelled the old man, pointing behind them.

Another chilling roar of rage from the impossible beast chasing them sealed the deal, and Sydney quickly spurted forward and dove into the darkness.

She landed face-first in a pile of sand.

Not a pile, she corrected herself. An entire beach.

There was a sudden popping sound, and Zack practically ran her over. He leaped to the side at the last instant and fell to his knees, panting heavily.

“What…where…?”

A second popping sound, and the old man walked past them and took a deep breath.

“That was a close one,” he said, shaking his head and pacing. “Did you see that dinosaur? That was a dinosaur! Fascinating! What would have happened had it caught us, I wonder? It would chew us up, certainly, but without a stomach, what then?”

“Who cares? We’d be dead!” interjected Sydney.

“Very true. Quite dead.” The old man turned and jumped back a step as if seeing Sydney and Zack for the first time. “You’re kids! Of course I knew you were kids, but I didn’t know you were actually kids! Why is she sending kids? What is she thinking?”

Sydney scrambled to her feet. They were on a wide, peaceful, yellow-tinted, sandy beach. The sun shone down, birds sang, waves tugged at the shore. Behind her was a small tent, out of which they had evidently emerged. There was neither sign nor sound of any rampaging dinosaur—skeletal or in the flesh.

“Where are we?” asked Zack, standing and brushing himself off.

The old man wasn’t listening. “She should know better.” He was muttering to himself. “Much too dangerous. It’s not a toy. What is Gladys thinking?”

Sydney’s ears perked up. “You know Aunt Gladys?” she asked.

The old man looked up in shock. “Aunt…? You mean you’re…” He took a step forward, peering at them as if through a magnifying glass. Sydney stumbled back a step in the face of such intense scrutiny. “That would mean…Are you…You’re Charlotte’s children?”

“You know our mom?” asked Zack. “What’s going on? Where are we? Who are you?”

Sydney had to hand it to Captain Obvious—those were all very good questions. She also wondered what was going on and where they were. However, she had a sneaky feeling she knew the answer to Zack’s final question.

“Simpering sunspots!” stuttered the old man awkwardly. “I never…Well, I guess I’m…” He took a deep breath before confirming Sydney’s suspicions. “I’m your grandfather.”