A couple of nights in the back of the tiki bar tucked into a sleeping bag helped Jonathan more than he’d expected. It oriented him to the clutter, by living within its borders, and thus he noticed it less. The less he noticed it, the less it bothered him. The more he could focus his energy on the baffling evidence around the three doors. Although he’d been careful to conceal them from R & D, so he had to pick his spots.
The mystery had multiplied in oddly banal ways. On day three, for example, when Jonathan checked the secret room, he had noticed that the marmot tracks now led back to the second door, with fresh boot prints as well.
What could that possibly mean? His dreams had been full of moments where he viewed himself sleeping on the floor of the tiki bar while some shadowy figure loomed over him. Each time, he’d shouted out, “Go away!” and the figure had retreated. He was fairly sure they’d all been dreams. Certainly, after waking up he’d not noticed anything amiss, had caught no further glimpses of Lady Insult.
During this span, Jonathan had successfully fought against his natural curiosity and not gone through any additional doors. He thought of those doors as leading to trails for which he didn’t have the map. Without some sort of guide, he’d best not use them.
But each night, Jonathan had snuck out of his tiki bar sanctuary and once more walked through the first door into the haunted mansion, looked in upon the dead creature, then poked his head through to Robin Hood’s Bay. Each time, it became more real to him, less like something he had dreamed. Each time, it assuaged, just enough, the itch to explore further. He knew this would be disastrous, that if he gave in to the urge he might disappear from Earth, never to return.
Instead, he focused on searching the basement for more information on the Order of the Third Door. If Dr. Lambshead refused to reveal all in his letter, then surely among the books piled as high as watchtowers in the basement, or in the chaotic first-floor library, there must be clues.
Yet clues were sparse and even after so much searching, Jonathan had found nothing. It seemed suspicious—an absence that formed a shape or a hole in the mansion’s contents. Every ripped-out page—and he found an astonishing number of books with ripped-out pages—made him more ill at ease. Even if most of the damage could be attributed to a poorly cared-for collection.
Could the solution to the mystery just as likely be that Dr. Lambshead’s famous impulsiveness and enthusiasm had made him impatient about lugging books about the mansion when he could tear out what he needed and fold it up in a pocket?
Then there was the matter of the object he’d been tasked by Dr. Lambshead to retrieve, the Black Bauble that had sent Stimply into such a panic. The “Wobble.”
“Retrieve it while no one else is around,” Dr. Lambshead had instructed in the letter. And, thus, on the second night in the basement, he’d crept on tiptoe to the mural of the serpent and looked with interest at the serpent’s dark eye.
With a bit of trepidation on Jonathan’s part, “place your thumb on the eye and push four times, wait two seconds, push in two more times” went from an instruction on a piece of paper to something he was doing. He already knew the whole wall would push in to reveal a secret room or corridor, as in some hackneyed gothic film. What would this new code do? Would he even get his thumb back?
Instead, nothing at all happened except the eye depressed slightly, by perhaps a quarter inch.
All right, now what?
He waited, concerned about the consequences of release.
Perhaps it would result in the top of the mansion blowing off and the entire second floor growing wings and becoming some complicated flying machine. Or, admittedly, something considerably less dramatic. Or even … nothing?
When Jonathan had waited for long enough that he felt a bit like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, he removed his thumb from the serpent’s eye.
The eye promptly ejected itself from the serpent, rolling across the floor. Jonathan caught up with it, snatched it up.
It appeared to be not the Wobble itself, but a case, as if for a monocle.
Inside the case was a flat, solid black circle. When he tapped the case, it fell out onto his palm and became a black sphere, with flashes of gold and emerald shooting across it. He couldn’t tell what the Wobble was made of. Rubber? Stone? Wood? The feel defied classification. The change in shape suggested plastic, but then it also drooped like a newborn droplet off a leaf when he started to put it away, flattening on impact with the case.
Whatever it was, Jonathan did as Dr. Lambshead had further instructed, placing it in his most secure pocket. “You are to keep it on your person at all times and tell no one about it. For it is the Black Bauble.”
No, Jonathan told himself, the Wobble.
After several fruitless experiments, he had to admit that the Wobble put him no closer to understanding what the Order of the Third Door was when it was home, nor what the dead machine-monster was in the haunted mansion.
“When the time comes, you will know what to do with it.” But he didn’t know what to do. About any of it.
Just one more question mark for now, and question marks at the moment felt like arrows to Jonathan.
From the wall, the serpent’s eye still stared out, black paint obscuring the fact that something had been removed from that space.
But some change in the perspective made the serpent’s expression appear angry, as if it knew he’d stolen something from it.
Even with this proliferation of mysteries, by the fourth night of his bivouac, his attempt to keep a vigil began to seem absurdly paranoid. As did his boring of additional peepholes in the wood of the tiki bar, that he might have the security of seeing out in all directions.
Why should he assume the woman would return at night? When they could hardly be sure there wasn’t during the day an entire Mad Hatter’s tea party going on in some backwater section of the basement hidden from view by a pile of Freds or the remains of hydraulic digging equipment covered in colorful hats.
For instance, right before lunch that very day, they had discovered the presence of moles in the northwest corner, where someone had smashed the cement of the foundation into rubble, allowing a patch of dirt and even a few yellowing weeds to find favor. A mole tunnel running across the surface seemed delightful to Jonathan, if dubious to Rack.
“For we are the moles, Jonathan,” he’d said. “Real moles are redundant. Even a tad insulting to us in our pre-mole forms. For we shall putter around here so long that like certain types of cave dwellers we shall lose our sight and we shall regain a much sharper sense of smell to compensate, and our hands shall become more like great clawed paws, the better to dig our burrows down here in the dark.”
“Just so it’s clear, we’re not harming any moles,” Jonathan said, ignoring Rack.
“Even if there’s structural damage?”
“No. Harm. To. Moles.”
“And if we find a bleedin’ badger down here?”
“Invite it to tea. Full stop.”
That was R & D’s signal for lunch, apparently, taking Tee with them, but Jonathan kept working. He wanted to keep working. There was no Floridian hiking path through old-growth forest waiting for him outside the mansion, no cypress knees, no pileated woodpecker calling. Just a pressure in his skull caused by Stimply and little matters like the Black Bauble weighting down his pocket.
He tried to concentrate on the junk, which now seemed to matter rather more than before. The lesson thus far was that any treasure, no matter how great, could be turned into junk by excessive quantity.
What to keep and what to throw out? At what point would he just be hauling it all away in lorries and giving it to the Salvation Army, no matter what Stimply had told him? A pile of old medals with inscriptions in foreign languages could be melted down or given to the Boy Scouts for reassignment, he supposed. He could advertise an estate sale and hope Dr. Lambshead’s reputation would bring potential buyers out in droves to such a remote location.
Oh, Poxforth! How he had begun to dislike the place and yet now longed for its semihallowed halls. Longed perhaps for the simplicity the academy represented. The structure.
He was still sorting through, and untangling, the pile of medals with inscriptions in foreign languages when he heard soft footfalls. Had Rack or Danny returned? He started to call out their names, but stopped himself. Something about the movement didn’t sound like them at all. Nor could he see that boisterous pair sneaking back down to scare him. Yet neither was this something quite so different as a rat or other underground denizen of the mansion, but instead the deliberate stealthy tread of some stranger—perhaps three rows down, parallel to his position and moving toward the exit.
So much for his tiki bar being of use for surveillance. He’d been caught out of position. But he knew hiding near the glorified birdbath would give him a view, too.
Quietly, Jonathan made for the birdbath, dodging the ever-present umbrellas, a few stray bowling trophies, a horde of candlesticks, and a tire iron. A stack of suitcases came into view, and he crouched behind it, tried to hear beyond his own breathing. Had the steps faded? Had he imagined it?
No, not at all. He’d guessed right, and the footfalls were much closer, as swift as his own had been just moments before.
He peeked around the corner of a large portmanteau, low as he could get without putting his hands in the dust for balance, waiting—and was rewarded a minute later with a glimpse of a figure in a dark robe or cloak. There, then gone.
Nimble, Jonathan followed, waiting until the figure reached the fuse box. The figure’s pace was deliberate, quick, but not panicked, as it disappeared into the corridor.
Jonathan made up the distance at something close to a fast walk.
Back to the wall, fuse box digging into his left shoulder, Jonathan peered around the doorway, into the corridor.
The figure had disappeared.
But he knew where—into the secret room. Quickly, he followed, pushed the eye of the python the requisite three times, hurried through to the alcove with the three doors, braced for a confrontation.
Nothing. No one.
If the figure had gone through the second or third door, Jonathan was out of luck, and he’d not follow anyway. But what if the figure had gone through the first?
Quietly as he could, he opened the first door and ducked through.
His luck held. A shadow that registered to him as a woman was walking away from him, into the semicircle with the weird clock tower. He hugged the wall, sidling forward, hoping she wouldn’t look over her shoulder.
She paused next to the clock tower and the circular sofa, half turned so Jonathan could see her face.
Lady Insult.
In the blue light, she came into focus—a pale face and thatchy dark brown hair, as if she’d cut it herself—eyes a startling bright blue, high cheekbones, and with a nose and mouth that Rack would have assessed, respectively, as “a pert cliché, but not annoying” and “neither full nor thin.” The same boots, dark trousers, and a dark shirt under the cloak.
Jonathan found Lady Insult beautiful as she stood there, unaware of him. Absolutely the last thought he’d expected to have. Beautiful for the sense of purpose, beautiful for the way he now thought of her as not just a figure by a pond giving him the what-for. There was something driven in her poise.
He crept closer.
She was concentrating hard, with one pale hand now touching the door, not palm-first, but with each of her four fingertips against its surface. Her body was rigid, upright, the very picture of tension or stress.
The door opened inward, into blackness. Lady Insult stood there. Then she took a step forward, disappeared through the doorway. The door shut behind her.
Later, he could have told Rack and Danny that the long day of cataloging dusty relics had taken its toll. Or he could have said it was just a perverse impulse, no matter the consequences, to have done with all sorts of niceties and rituals.
But, whatever the case, when Jonathan came out of hiding, he already knew what he was going to do. He paused at the same door for just a moment. This was a risk of a different order of magnitude than peeking in on Robin Hood’s Bay. But, in the end, there was only one way he could think of to break the paralysis of feeling powerless, of feeling ignorant.
Jonathan took a deep breath and plunged through the doorway.
He shouted out, flailed, tripped, fell, sprawled against a hard surface, bruising his shins and elbows.
He lay there a moment, collecting his wits. Well, that was anti-climactic or too dramatic or just not what he’d expected.
Jonathan felt vaguely wounded at the lack of transition, was cursing as he picked himself up, thinking perhaps the door hadn’t taken, and he’d just fallen through into a corridor beyond.
But no: He was already somewhere else.
Cacophony expressed through heat and strident loud explosions and a constant pounding. All of it intimate in Jonathan’s head as if a corkscrew had been driven into both ears. He lay sprawled on the floor of a round stone building—a tower?—staring up at the damaged wooden beams of a ceiling long ago flame-seared and now reverberating with the impact of those explosions dislodging dust and splinters. Dull light crept in through slits in the walls at eye level, but there were no windows. Had he traded the trap of a ghost mansion for some sort of hell turret?
At the far edge of the cobblestone floor were corkscrew metal stairs leading down to a basement and up at least one more story. There was no sign of the woman.
Jonathan’s mouth was dry. His hands shook a little. He felt a tightness and a formless nausea. Heard his mother’s voice: “Calm down. Take stock. Slow time.” Right. He needed to anchor himself before he could hope to address questions like, Why are there so many explosions so close by?
The pounding again. The smell of fire. The horrible sound.
Another lurching thud, much stronger.
A clatter and torrent of voices. The dull smack of boots on metal steps. Six or seven people, some dressed in what read to him as odd robes and some in even odder military uniforms—the ones with the pointy bits atop the helmets, as if to thwart an enemy from above—ran down the narrow spiral of the stairs, frantic to get to the basement. They didn’t stand still long enough for Jonathan to get much sense of them. Nor did they spare him even a glance.
Fast on their heels scampered a foot-tall carrot with orange arms and legs popping out from a pale wrinkled torso. Beneath a frazzled froth of green leaves spurting from the top of its head, the carrot had scared dots for eyes and a startled “o” for a mouth.
It was holding hands with a little … a little potato person. A potato a bit smaller than the carrot with large bloodshot eyes and a slit for a mouth. Sturdy legs. Pudgy arms.
At the first-floor landing, they paused in their headlong rush to look at him. Jonathan stared in astonishment, mouth open, frozen.
The carrot’s expression had changed from fear to irritation. It said to its companion, in a harsh, judgmental tone, “He’s not from around here.”
“He’ll last a day at most,” the potato said in the most melodious voice Jonathan had ever heard.
“I give it an hour. Oh well. Not our problem,” the carrot said, glaring at Jonathan.
“Can’t even speak,” the potato said. “He’s got no chance at all.”
“I can speak!” Jonathan managed.
“Then why are you just sitting there like a clod?” the carrot asked in a grumpy tone. “There’s no time. Leave now if you want to get out.”
The potato person said: “Oh, never fear—it’ll get worse. Much worse. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill everyone. And they won’t even have the decency to plant you after.”
They brushed past him without another word, the carrot giving Jonathan the elbow in the process.
A talking potato. A talking carrot.
As the impossible duo vanished down the stairs, Jonathan had a terrible thought.
He whirled around, was confronted by a normal stone wall. Not even the outline of a door.
His way home was gone.