“Memory is what the mind fills in out of necessity,” Dr. Lambshead had written in A Life Without Porridge, his memoir. “Memory gathers a kind of uncanny magic to it—turns life, without warning, into story, and story into a life. It sneaks about in ways few understand.”
Perhaps that was true, perhaps not, although a scrawled note from Dr. Lambshead in the margin of Jonathan’s copy that read “Memory puts hair on your chest and then hair in your ears—and then everywhere else” rather undercut the point. Nor was an Order of the Third Door mentioned anywhere on those pages.
Jonathan’s copy bore a bookplate not with his given name but another name entirely. This was long before his mother ever allowed him to use the name “Jonathan Lambshead.” At the time, he went by the name Peter Cellars, and when he asked his mother why he must maintain such a disguise, she would say only, “The other choice, my dear son, was ‘Underhill,’ and that’s been taken.” It was one of her few jokes, not much repeated and not understood by him until later—but sometimes he pressed the issue of names just to hear her rare unfettered laugh. And because it made him feel dangerous, like a spy. And, finally, because he feared his father would never find him if he wasn’t Jonathan, in Plain View.
Yet he was thinking again of Peter Cellars and whether it would be best to fade into that name, return to Florida, while in the pantry stuffing some toast and marmalade into his face for breakfast. Rack had relented in the barrage of nonstop talking, gone to investigate some other wing of the mansion, vigorously relying on a walking stick to negotiate the tricky bits of passageways. But Jonathan could still hear Rack’s booming voice, a kind of echolocator hollow with high ceilings and whispery with the low. Somehow it made Jonathan’s little meal melancholy, the ghosts of that place conveyed via echo.
But, anyway, Rack returned too soon to herd him down into the basement.
“Ready is as ready does, Gloom Bean,” Rack said, tossing his plate into the sink. “And we’re ready already.”
Gloom was gloom apparently, for the coiled serpent still threatened, with a ravenous eye, and the three doors had not lightened nor brightened anything about them, and he tried to ignore that side of the corridor, along with Rack’s relentless banter.
Rack rather liked the serpent, thought it “stylish and daring.” Jonathan thought it served as omen only.
Soon enough, the glory of Dr. Lambshead’s collections, the fabled Cabinet of Curiosities, spread out before him: an enormous warehouse bigger than an airport hangar. Nothing could have prepared him for the preposterous depth of that expanse, certainly not the floor plan, which had not noted the scale or the high ceiling.
Nor had the floor plan included any notation to expect everything to be a complete and utter mess. But it was. A catastrophe. A battlefield of inanimate objects as dense as what had awaited him in the mansion proper. High shelves full of inventory had toppled over, and random barricades of crates resembled last defenses against some forgotten enemy.
“Bloody hell.”
“Holy hell for you, American boy.”
“Bloody hell, y’all,” Jonathan said stubbornly. He quite liked relaxing back into Britishisms. And keeping his Florida-isms.
“ ‘Y’all’ is an abomination upon the face of the deep.”
“No worries,” Jonathan said. Rack hated “no worries,” too.
“I’m just going to pretend you apologized for the abomination,” Rack said, having allowed him time to take in the extent of the disaster. “You may now understand your failure to foist that ridiculous floor plan back at Poxforth. Order hath no dominion over this … this cave.”
“Well, it’s not that bad,” Jonathan said, perversely feeling he should defend his grandfather.
“ ‘A thesis on the curve became a dog turd on the curb,’ ” Rack said, quoting a Poxforth professor about a student’s translation from the French.
“Depends on your attitude toward turds. And curbs.”
“Aren’t we all very much pro-curb?”
If there was any order to the basement, it came via the path from the doorway, which branched off into three separate “tunnels” through the junk. They were headed down the central spoke toward some birdbath contraption, while down the left-hand path, leading to a distant corner, lay all sorts of wreckage, including what appeared to be a ruined tiki bar. Ripped from its original moorings near some beach and deposited here.
Near the tiki bar lay a pile of old deep-sea diver suits, looking at that distance like badly stacked canvas dolls with metal heads. More Freds. Had Dr. Lambshead at one point led an army of deep-sea divers into some ocean trench?
A disembodied voice called out from somewhere in the stacks. Danny.
“Hallo, Jonathan! You know this place is a mess, right? A complete cocked-up bollocks of a disaster. Turns out your grandpap couldn’t be bothered to make it even a skoosh easy.”
Jonathan smiled. He couldn’t ever be anything but fond of Danny. He always felt a bit diminished in her presence, but so did Rack, Jonathan suspected, and he always experienced a pleasant urge to keep up, to try to be older than his years.
“It’s not a pleasant enough cock-up?” Jonathan asked as Danny emerged from an aisle, wiping her hands on a rag that might once have been a fancy embroidered dish towel.
Danny’s dyed blond hair was a mess, but tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in flip-flops, cutoff jean shorts, and an old T-shirt that read POXFORTH WOMEN’S RUGBY: WE’RE SCRUM-TIOUS. DEAL WITH IT. Her legs were less like tree trunks than like steel twisted into the form of human flesh. In other ways, she resembled her brother, but unlike Rack, her face was set in an expression of wonder at the miraculous nature of the universe, accentuated by dark eyebrows. At first, Jonathan had thought that meant she was naive. But no: She was just perpetually curious, and over time she converted even the most jaded to her cause.
“Mate, it’s a junkyard masquerading as a collection,” she said. “You couldn’t find a mess this rich outside a Dickens novel. But no worries. It’s brilliant!” A season in Australia at a rugby training camp had forever diluted the true Brit in her. That included any modicum of reserve.
She gave Jonathan a big hug, nearly cracking a rib, and a rough kiss on each cheek. Honestly, he found her strength astonishing; she practiced with the men’s rugby team, when they weren’t feeling too fragile. Once, she’d thought about playing cricket, but the pace of the game exasperated her and she broke a week of bats against various walls in frustration at “all the waiting around.” Often “banged up” but cheerful about it.
“Frankly, it gives me the creeps,” Rack said. “Such a strange and unsanitary place. Have you noticed that odd map of Earth on the wall? If it’s accurate, I can waltz from here to Brittany, no Chunnel required.”
“Yeah—isn’t that great!” Danny said, giving her brother a playful punch in the shoulder. “It’s got some amazing ‘here be dragons’ beasties on it. Real grotesques. Lots I haven’t seen before, yeah?”
“Yes, it’s so great that there’s no phone reception in this dump,” Rack said, “so I can’t authenticate the value of what’s down here. Dr. Lambshead could have stolen the queen’s silver and we wouldn’t have a clue. His filing system seems to have been devised by a blind drunk sailor on shore leave, in a brothel.”
“I don’t need to know what’s valuable,” Jonathan said. “I just need to put a name and number and description to it all. Then this hoarder’s paradise is all mine.”
Danny raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you’ll want to know the value. I would, at least. There is lots of treasure! Do you know, I think I found the forearm of a Catholic saint back there? Or maybe it’s from a rare animal, yeah? Or even ripped off one of your ancestors?”
“Ripped off, I agree with,” Rack muttered darkly, but what he meant perhaps even Rack might not know.
Stimply hadn’t said anything about whether Dr. Lambshead wanted him to keep the contents of the house. Perhaps Dr. Lambshead intended for him to live amongst it, so long as it was all named and numbered.
“Take this … birdbath, for lack of a better term, laden with bear guns and the like … what do you make of it?” Danny gestured toward the elephant in the room: a grotesquely ornate marble fountain or, yes, birdbath, that rose waist high while the central flourishes continued up toward a depiction of small dolphins or large fish leaping out of marble water spouts.
The deep basin contained a confusion of items, including a stash of antique muskets with brass triggers like tiny smooth tongues. A sign tossed on top had scrawled on it, FOR YOUR RUSE, possibly in Dr. Lambshead’s hand, even though in theory everything in the basement was for their use. Assuming that was a typo.
“Bear guns?” Jonathan asked.
The idea of a bear gun seemed pointless to him, black bears in Florida being rather shy and retiring—and nonexistent back at Robin Hood’s Bay. But it struck him that the items had all been left there after Dr. Lambshead’s death, for surely his attackers would’ve taken them otherwise?
“Yes! Bear musket, rather,” Danny said. “Rather a lot of reloading required. By which time you’re lunch! Which is when, by the by?”
She said this with such a bloodthirsty enthusiasm Jonathan wondered if she knew what she was saying. Or if the bears with which she was acquainted were much different than the ones he knew.
“Just because it has a label like ‘bear gun’ means less than nothing, sister-blister,” Rack said. “Not in this benighted collection. It might as well be labeled ‘trick spatula’ or ‘horseradish croissant.’ ”
“Maybe you’re a trick spatula,” Danny countered.
“Presumably it means a gun designed to shoot bears,” Jonathan said.
Rack scowled. “Yes, but next to it are guns labeled ‘otter gun,’ ‘weasel gun,’ ‘sparrow gun,’ and ‘hamster gun.’ Wouldn’t you say that means this is a bit of a joke, old bean? I’m not trying to be difficult, I promise—I mention this to illustrate a larger point about the profound hopelessness of our task and life in general.
“And there’s an envelope Danny plucked from the mess—addressed to you,” Rack said.
“There is?”
Danny handed it over without comment, but then they both crowded around to read over Jonathan’s shoulder. Rack smelled like lavender cologne, and Danny smelled like hay, Bactine, and the lingering fear of her opponents, which seemed about right.
Jonathan opened the bulky envelope. It contained a note as well as three objects: a small key, an odd pocketknife, and a weird clam-shaped brass object with inscriptions on it.
Dear Jonathan:
You are about to start a journey. You might even call it a quest. I can help prepare you for what I think might happen, but I can’t predict everything. You’ll have to discover things on your own to truly understand them.
What you’ll find here in the birdbath I’ve placed here for a reason. Make good use of it. The key is for the Château Le Fou à la Menthe. I hope you never have to use it, for if the château appears, things have gotten dire. (Sark and Jaunty Blue, indeed!)
The Astronomical Compendium for Subterranean Places, sometimes known as the DeVesto compass after its creator, orients not to north and south, but to up and down, among other settings, and I suspect it will be of more immediate use. The knife and the guns should be self-explanatory.
When you find the Black Bauble, you are to keep it on your person at all times and tell no one about it. For it is the Black Bauble. When the time comes, you will know what to do with it. (Remember to Wobble your Bauble!)
It’s not a chosen life, Jonathan. It’s not a life anyone would want, given the choice. But it’s the one you’ll have to live, so you must make the best of it.
Much love,
Thwack (late of the Order of the Third Door)
PS: Notes from dead people may not seem like much solace, but you’ll find quite a few here, as I had more time than most to contemplate the abyss. So get used to it.
PPS: Also, you may remember my neighbor, Reggie. It’s possible he’ll pop round. You may count on his frank and honest counsel.
Jonathan had never, ever met the phantom Reginald. He still suspected, given Dr. Lambshead’s odd sense of humor, that Reggie was a friend of the family who did not actually exist. Had Dr. Lambshead been batty toward the end? Or did this have something to do with Lady Insult? He didn’t like that thought. Nor did he like how parts of the note echoed the secret compartment in the telephone in the study.
Even less did he like how the parts of the note not about the “birdbath” were word for word a copy of the original letter Stimply had given him from Dr. Lambshead.
“Oh, a quest!” Danny said. “Spiffy. Posh. Exciting.”
“Not any of those words,” Rack groused. “Much more like a scavenger hunt dressed up like a quest. And excruciatingly serious!”
“Rack.” Danny smacked Rack on the shoulder. He was so used to it, he hardly winced. “Rack! The man is dead, and he’s still trying his best to take care of Jonathan.”
Which was a little surprising, considering how distant his grandfather had been in life.
“Château Le Fou à la Menthe: Château Peppermint Blonkers. Sounds like one of your ridiculous television shows, Danny.”
“They’re not ridiculous, and I dispute your translation, yeah? No château anywhere is named Peppermint Blonkers. Nor do châteaus just ‘appear.’ Nor, I’m sure, are Sark and Jaunty Blue a comedy duo. Which I’m sure would be your guess.”
“Dispute and obfuscate all you like, dear sister. That’s not just an accurate translation from the French—that’s likely the condition of Dr. Lambshead’s mind.” And as if aware he’d gone too far, Rack added, “With all due respect, Jonathan.”
But Jonathan had tuned them out. Along with the note was the aforementioned key, small and so ornate as to have fit well with the court at Versailles, and on a simple necklace of twine, the round “astronomical compendium”—which was just a strange brass compass with markings he couldn’t interpret—and the knife, which was both like and unlike a Swiss Army knife. For one thing, it had a friendly face etched across it and a base made to look like legs.
As Jonathan studied these items, there came the sensation of warm little paws and Danny’s admonishment not to move, and his left shoulder became completely occupied by a plush-looking rat.
“Surprise!” Danny said. “In case we need extra help!”
“Rat,” Jonathan managed. “A lovely, lovely rat!” Where had Danny produced him from?
“I told Danny you’d prefer advance warning,” Rack said. “But she insisted you wouldn’t go into cardiac arrest.”
The peculiar white-and-black creature stared at him with an air of profound wisdom or disinterest. The rat looked like it was wearing a cardigan, questing on its hind legs with its nose up, sniffing, front paws like pink stars.
Danny laughed. “Oh, Jonathan. I knew you’d love him.” Which presumed a lot. “Meet Twinkle Toes—Tee-Tee for short. He’s a woolly rat.”
She scooped up the rat and plopped him onto her shoulder. “A rescue from the Porthfox zoology department.” Danny’s little play on words; she often said Porthfox instead of Poxforth. “I had to beg a permit and quarantine him and everything. He’s not from around here.” Pirates had parrots. Danny as often as not had a small mammal secreted somewhere about her person.
Tee-Tee wasn’t wearing a cardigan; he just had exceptionally rough, thick fur. Danny wasn’t the sort to spend time sitting around knitting a sweater for a rat, anyhow. Jonathan gave the rat an experimental rub on top of the head and was not rebuffed. The truth was, his spirits were rather lifted by Tee-Tee’s appearance. But could Tee help with the inventory? Jonathan found that unlikely, tried not to read much into the way the rat kept staring at him. He already had a reputation as an animal whisperer with the Rackhams, so he didn’t ask his favorite question: “If your [animal in question] could talk, what would it say?”
“He’s officially Danny’s other brother and has been for the week or two,” Rack said with disgust.
“Not true,” Danny said to Jonathan, retrieving Tee-Tee for her own shoulder. “I haven’t yet made it official under the law, for one thing. That’s a project for next month, if Rack doesn’t measure up. But it’s true that Tee-Tee is a very old and wise rat.”
“When she requires a trusted opinion from a confidante, she asks Tee-Tee, not me. It doesn’t matter if the question is ‘Why do rats shit so much?’ or ‘What was the first jazz club in Brighton?’ ”
Danny hit Rack in the shoulder again, this time without much affection. “Liar! Apologize to Tee-Tee! You hurt Tee’s feelings.”
“How can you tell?”
It was true that Tee-Tee’s expression hadn’t changed, and he clung to Danny’s shoulder like he was born to it.
Rat, Jonathan pleaded, please don’t ripple or fade or do anything else preternatural. He didn’t think he could take anything much more peculiar at the moment than another room full of bird feeders.
“Right, it’s a lovely rat. But it’s time to get some work done,” Jonathan said, although it was clear Danny already had.
He gave the DeVesto compass to Danny, whose delight at the gift was clear; she loved compasses. Then he put the key around his neck and shoved the knife in his pocket. Each had a comfortable weight, a pleasing heft and coolness to the touch.
His suspicions came not from the items, but their lack of secretiveness: displayed in the open, easily found. When had Stimply left the items? Jonathan very much doubted they’d been around long. Otherwise, he was sure, Lady Insult would have pilfered them. For a moment he had the paranoid thought that Stimply might actually be hiding in some secret part of the mansion.
It was so much easier to see the threats out in the world beyond people. As a child at Robin Hood’s Bay, he just had to remember not to walk too close to the edge of the cliffs, not lean too far over staring down into an empty well. Avoid strange doors. In Florida, a wild boar or a snake could be predicted, and all you needed to do was be careful and observant.
But humans? Jonathan couldn’t fathom them at all, sometimes.
As that first day of sorting continued, Jonathan couldn’t help a certain jumpiness. He had a sense of being watched, and there were odd sounds as of antiques shifting, or rambunctious mice, or pipes in the wall that did their best impression of ghosts clanking with chains. Nor did he appreciate Rack and Danny making jokes about him being rattled.
Meanwhile, the haunted mansion, the three doors and where they led, were in his thoughts always, along with the image of the creature. It all popped up to disturb his thoughts and interfere with the cataloging.
Perhaps, though, if he were honest, he’d already begun to lose his appetite for the reality of sorting through such an overwhelming collection—an absurdly banal chore after everything he’d learned since coming to the mansion.
Which also made Rack and Danny’s continued delight difficult to bear. They had not signed on for anything except an interesting summer adventure in his grandfather’s mansion. Surely, he must shield all his misgivings and suspicions from R & D as best he could? Surely, he had the discipline for that?
Finding some of his old things from Robin Hood’s Bay didn’t help. A bag of marbles, a toy telescope, and a stuffed mutt of a dog in a red sweater that he’d worn mangy with hugs.
He guessed he’d forgotten them here when they’d left so suddenly for Florida …
The row between Sarah and Dr. Lambshead had occurred on that last visit to the mansion. He’d always thought it was because his grandfather had offered him a sip of spirits, or maybe because he’d shown Jonathan the three doors, but he couldn’t be sure. Either seemed a meager motive for what had happened next: a quick breakfast with Sarah’s dagger eyes aimed at a Dr. Lambshead whose head was bowed, followed by a ferocious argument behind closed doors.
There was no return to Robin Hood’s Bay. Immediate travel to London the next day and on to Florida, with Sarah never giving him any explanation beyond “it’s not safe” for wrenching him out of one life to live another.
In truth, it wasn’t totally unexpected. He’d always thought something like that could happen. Sarah had always seemed on the lookout for disaster, for some unforeseen something looming just beyond the horizon. As if danger would peer out sinister from between the seat cushions on an ordinary train trip. It was a peculiarly selective eye for danger. He could have all the freedom he wanted roaming the wild landscape on the abandoned farmland and surrounding woods of their home near Robin Hood’s Bay. He could exhaust himself exploring inlets and taking grass-clogged paths along the cliffs, where it wasn’t inconceivable he might fall and break a leg … but god forbid if he wanted to go into the town proper by himself and be among people.
There had been no arguing with her over their move to Florida—she had taught Jonathan that when she used a certain tone, gave him a certain look, he must obey or risk a much more horrible and harder-to-endure look, and possibly a time-out in a chair facing a corner for hours, which was torture.
Dr. Lambshead left his clues scattered about everywhere, but his daughter was the secretive one; she’d never leave him anything as obvious as a note. Nor had Sarah been any more forthcoming before her trip to the Alps. All she had told him prior to the trip, during a hurried phone call to Poxforth, was that she had “some business to attend to abroad.”
“But you don’t have a job,” Jonathan had said, which was another way of asking why.
“Not a job per se. A mission. You have to trust me.”
“I’ve trusted you my whole life. Why don’t you trust me?” He’d put it plain, and the hurt in the middle of that.
“I do trust you, love. But it’s not the right time.”
“What’s the right time, then? When I’m ancient and in a home?”
Sarah laughed. That pure laugh he heard so rarely, but was always infectious enough to make him laugh, too. Until they were both giggling for no reason.
And that was the last time he had talked to her.
Laughter enough to end a conversation. Laughter to say goodbye.
If only she’d told him what was going on. But, then, too, would it have been different if he’d gone with her? Or would he have been one more unrecoverable corpse buried in an avalanche? Questions that, as he searched through Dr. Lambshead’s collection, made him fidgety and out of sorts and uncomfortable in his skin.
The final straw was finding the stack of photographs behind a dusty samovar: images of Sarah as an adult with her father. Lambshead at a museum, Sarah turned around in a chair at some charity event, Sarah petting a golden retriever. He ignored the men standing beside his mother in those photos, or in the backdrop—trying to guess if one of them was his father was an old, bad habit.
As recently as late spring, out at the lake beside Poxforth, feeding ducks, a shadow had fallen over him and something about the silhouette, the hat atop the head, was undeniably masculine. Jonathan’s first thought had been “Father?” And he’d almost looked ridiculous by uttering that question out loud, only to see, shielding his eyes, that it was the Poxforth groundskeeper on his rounds.
Sick with himself for falling for the hope once more, he needed to banish the idea of “family” once and for all, but “father” most of all.
“I saw a strange woman in the backyard yesterday,” he blurted out to his friends as they all took a break on canvas chairs they’d set up around the bear-gun birdbath. He didn’t add: “I also discovered we could return to Robin Hood’s Bay in an instant, just by opening a door.”
“That was me in a dress,” Rack replied.
“She wasn’t in a dress.”
“That was me in a catsuit,” Rack replied.
“She wasn’t in a catsuit. But she was very insulting … I also saw a strange marmot.”
”That was Tee, yeah, all puffed out and buff,” Danny said, smirking. “A buff puff living rough.”
“Just how strange a marmot, Jonathan?” Rack asked. “Did it sing ‘Ave Maria’ whilst wearing some sort of naval costume—or was it just in its altogether and sporting a funny look?”
“What is it with you and sailors?”
“Not a fan of military uniforms, are we?” Rack asked.
“Fair enough. I’m the ridiculous one, I suppose.”
“Not at all. Not. At. All,” Danny said. “You’re just mysterious. We don’t mind mysterious. And we’ll deal with the strange woman when she pops up again. Probably just an ex-employee of your grandfather’s. As for a strange marmot, we’ll take it under advisement. We’ll be on the lookout. I’ll have Tee have a word if we see him. Good enough?”
“I don’t think this is a joke,” Jonathan said.
“No it’s not,” Rack said quietly, his air of sarcasm dissipating. “We know it’s serious. We know your grandfather was a strange man. We know that this collection is a serious thing, that you’re burdened by the weight of it. That you don’t know what it contains or why you’ve been set on this dusty cleanup quest. And that’s why we’ve committed to helping you.”
“Too little credit, Jonathan,” Danny said. “We’d like more credit, yeah? We make light when we’re nervous, but we thought it might cheer you up.”
“And, honestly, I needed something different this summer. Some distraction. Damn it to hell, but it’s a rat’s nest in here, so even Tee may prove of use. He’ll be our rescue rat; he’ll dig us out from under all the brass pots and ruined umbrellas when they fall on us. Although if those diving suits come to life, all bets are off.”
Jonathan took a deep breath. “Fair enough,” he said, because it was—more than fair. “I’ll find a smile and a better attitude.”
“Back to work, yeah?” Danny said brightly.
“Not until I try on this fabulous bodybuilder suit,” Rack said, holding up a vaguely human form in beige deflated plastic with fake abs painted on it. “I want to be what the kids today call ‘swole.’ ”
“Swole like a mole on the dole,” Danny said.
At which point, the conversation got very silly.
But Jonathan didn’t miss the glance she exchanged with Rack. Perhaps they were having second thoughts after all. He wouldn’t blame them.