Going up the driveway, I occasionally looked up through the oak trees along the side to see if I could spot any of the pterodactyls or UFOs or whatever it was Alf was worried about. I saw nothing.
The house was big and boxy with castle-like turrets on three of the four corners. It looked old enough for George Washington to have slept in, assuming George was capable of dozing off in a place that looked like it might be infested with zombies.
We found the servants’ entrance on the south side of the house. Freak retrieved the key from under the mat, fit it into the lock of the windowless metal door, and pushed cautiously inward.
We peered into the gloom beyond the doorway. A small room contained a table and three mismatched chairs. In the far wall were two stairways, one leading up, the other leading down.
“I would leave the door open,” admitted Freak.
“I had no plans to close it,” I agreed.
“Here’s a note,” said Fiona, who had stepped in and picked up a piece of paper she found on the table.
UP. DOWN THE CORRIDOR TO THE LEFT. SECOND DOOR ON THE RIGHT.
“Is he kidding? Why didn’t he just meet us here?” Freak complained.
“Maybe he’s in a wheelchair,” said Fiona.
“Having had both legs cut off in the duel that damaged the sofa,” I suggested.
There was a rumble from the downward-leading stairway, like maybe a furnace had just started up or a small dinosaur was having a bowel movement. We looked at one another and scurried up the other stairway.
We found ourselves in a long corridor lit by a single lightbulb and went left, just as the note had instructed. On our right we passed a metal circuit-breaker box and then a door. Freak started to walk past the door and I said, “Wait.”
“What?”
“The note said the second door.”
“Yeah. So? This is the first door.”
“Not if you count the door on the metal box.”
“Why,” said Fiona, through gritted teeth, “would you count the door on the metal box? It’s tiny. You can’t walk through it.”
“But it’s a door,” I said. They both looked at me. “Maybe it’s a test.”
“A test of what?”
“How well we can count?”
Freak shrugged. He knocked on the door. When nobody answered, he tried the knob.
“It’s locked. This isn’t the door.”
“Wait,” I said again. My guts twisted up the way they sometimes did during the scarier parts of monster movies.
It was an old-fashioned door, solid looking, made of four wooden panels, two on top, two on the bottom. I realized it looked like the windowpane pattern I had seen on the underside of my eyelids when I’d been lying on the sofa. The panes had pulsed. I tried to remember the pattern.
I tapped the door’s upper right panel twice. Then I tapped the left panel once. Then I tapped the right two more times. The door latch clicked and the door swung open an inch. Light streamed through the gap.
“How did you do that?” asked Freak.
I shrugged. “I followed a pattern I saw in my head when I was lying on the sofa,” I said.
“You had a vision,” Fiona said flatly.
“I guess.”
Freak pushed the door open. We followed him through it.
It was the hideout of a serial killer. At least, it looked like the kind of room the cops always found on TV shows when they were hunting a dangerous lunatic. Bulletin boards hung on the walls, and the boards were covered with articles clipped from newspapers and magazines, handwritten notes, and photographs. Pieces of yarn secured with thumbtacks connected one thing to another, sometimes stretching halfway across a wall. It could also have been, I realized, the room of a detective who was working hard to solve a case.
A map of Hellsboro with the Rodmore Chemical plant at its center was pinned up next to photographs of different breeds of dogs. A picture of a black helicopter shared space with a map of downtown Cheshire and a magazine ad for Agra Nation® brand mac and cheese. One whole bulletin board was devoted to pictures of people I didn’t recognize.
A diagram of what might have been a basketball sliced in half was stuck up next to a poster-size photo looking down into a valley from way up on the side of a mountain. The photo was so sharp and clear that Fiona, who has no head for heights, could only glance at it and look away. The valley had a lake in it that formed the perfect outline of an elephant.
“Where on earth is that?” said Freak.
“Maybe it’s not on earth,” I murmured, managing to make myself feel even more creeped out than I already did.
Everywhere there were notes on index cards in a crabbed, hurried handwriting.
THE WAY TO INDORSIA MUST BE KEPT CLOSED!
PRIMORDIAL SOUP IN REVIVARIUM TOO SALTY. REDUCE SODIUM.
USE KIDS! BOYS HAVE NO PHONES. GIRL MAY BE MATCH FOR MIRANDA.
PEANUT BUTTER MISSING FROM LAST ORDER. SPEAK TO DELIVERY MAN.
“What does it mean,” asked Fiona suspiciously, “ ‘USE KIDS’?”
“Maybe these kids here,” said Freak, tapping a photograph. It showed the three of us waiting at the bus stop.
“That does it!” said Fiona, snatching the photo from the wall. “We should get out of here right now! You guys have no phones. I could be a match for Miranda!”
“Only if Miranda is a nutcase,” said Freak. “That note may have nothing to do with us. I mean, who’s Miranda?”
“Maybe Alf’s looking for a babysitter,” I suggested.
“HE PHOTOGRAPHED US!”
“He also photographed squirrels and birds and passing cars,” I said, pointing to a series of similar photos. “They look like they’re all from the camera in the gatepost. It’s a security camera. He’s worried about things near the entrance to his property. That’s all.”
“Oh,” said Fiona, starting to calm down. “Well. Maybe.”
She turned. Then she jumped like she had just seen a snake.
Freak and I turned, and we jumped with her.
The sofa was behind us.
It was right next to the door. I didn’t see how we could have missed it when we came in.
“No, no, no, no,” said Freak, shaking his head and sounding less confident than he usually did. “That’s NOT the same sofa. There’s no stain on the cushion and there’s no cut along the back. It’s another sofa from the same set of furniture.”
I pointed.
A wet maple leaf clung to one of the sofa’s dragon-claw feet.
“My dream was right,” I said. “I was told the sofa can tesser. Which, in case you didn’t know, means it can move around on its own.”
“NO, IT CAN’T!” Freak grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around so we were looking at each other eye-to-eye. “You have to turn off this imagination of yours SOMETIME, River Man! It’s a sofa. It stays wherever it’s put. Our sofa is still out by the road. This is a different sofa.”
“Sure,” I agreed, trying to pacify him. “Maybe Alf got them at a two-for-one sale.”
“This isn’t the right room,” muttered Fiona. “We’re not supposed to be here.”
“He’s going to wonder what’s taking us so long,” I said.
“Do we actually still want to meet him, after seeing this?” asked Fiona. “This has nutzoid written all over it.”
“Actually, the word I keep seeing is Indorsia,” I said, pointing to another hand-scribbled note. This one read,
INDORSIA MUST NEVER DRAW ATTENTION TO ITSELF.
“I don’t think this is serial-killer stuff,” I added.
“No,” agreed Freak. “It’s more like mad-scientist stuff. I don’t see how that’s much better.”
“Somehow I knew how to open that door,” I pointed out. “Like we were invited in here. I say we meet him.”
“And I say we leave,” said Fiona.
We both looked at Freak. The final vote was his.
“The high bid on the crayon is eleven thousand dollars,” I said.
Freak looked at me narrowly.
“Fine.” He sighed. “Anybody who’s upset because he didn’t get his peanut butter doesn’t sound all that dangerous to me. Let’s go see what’s behind door number two.”
As we slipped out, I turned to close the door, and I thought I heard a tch-tch noise, like someone making a sound of disapproval between his tongue and teeth. I leaned back in. The swinging door reflected a flash of light into the room’s far corner—and I could have sworn the angled reflection looked a little like a floating ax. A woodchopper’s ax with no woodchopper holding it. I dove out of the room and tried to convince myself that Freak was right about my overactive imagination.
I caught up with my friends at the next door. Freak was already knocking loudly on it.
“Come in!” said an equally loud voice from the other side.
We opened the door to a brightly lit kitchen, with a stove and an icebox like the kinds you see in movies that take place when cars were a new invention. A workstation with an ancient sink built into it sat squarely in the room’s center.
On the far side of this island was Alf.
He was kneeling, so the only part of him we could see was his head. His chin was on the countertop. He flashed us a grin as we entered. “Just a sec!” he said, and tilted his head to one side. Pots and pans rattled around in the lower part of the workstation. After a moment he straightened up, holding a lemon squeezer triumphantly in one hand.
“I’m thinking of making lemonade,” he said brightly.
He came around the side of the counter and approached us with his hand outstretched. He shook Freak’s hand, then turned to Fiona and me and did the same. “Of course, if you’re the sensible people I think you are,” he added, “you wouldn’t accept anything to eat or drink from me, so maybe I won’t. If I made lemonade, would you drink it?”
We shook our heads in unison.
“No, quite right. And you were apparently quite hesitant coming down the hall. Possibly looking for trapdoors in the floor. That demonstrates an admirable caution. This is a promising start.” He looked at the lemon squeezer in his hand. “Maybe I’ll make some for myself later.” He put the squeezer down on the counter next to some lemons and a canister marked SUGAR.
Alf was a tall man with sandy-colored hair parted in the middle. Eyes as gray as the shingles on his house sat on either side of a nose that was long and sharp and looked a little like an eagle’s beak. He was wearing a tan tweed suit with a floppy yellow bow tie and a dark green vest with a pocket-watch chain looped across the front of it. He looked like somebody who rode around in a horse and buggy.
“Did you bring the crayon?” he asked.
Freak nodded warily.
“Excellent. We should probably check to see what the current high bid on the auction is. By the way, I’m Alf.” He pointed at me. “And you’re River. And you’re Fiona. And you’re… Freak.” He gazed at Freak for a moment. “That can’t be your real name.”
“Nope,” agreed Freak. Alf continued to stare at Freak, as if he expected Freak to state his real name, but Freak showed no inclination to do so.
Alf started across the kitchen, gesturing that we should follow. He led us through the house, up a marble staircase, and into an art gallery.
At least, it looked like an art gallery to me. Reproductions of famous paintings hung on all four walls. The Mona Lisa smiled at us; a skull-headed guy on a bridge screamed at us; George Washington crossed the Delaware like he was trying to get away from us. Mixed in with the famous stuff were portraits of people I didn’t know. One was a portrait of a beautiful woman wearing medieval armor. She had her helmet off.
Renaissance? I wondered, possibly because I had recently learned to spell the word. I looked more closely and noticed something resembling a modern army tank in the background. I decided the painting might be more recent than I thought.
“This one at the end is called Guernica,” Alf said, indicating a painting so huge that it completely filled the wall at the far end of the room. It showed, in what I thought was a somewhat cartoony style, a bunch of people and barnyard animals experiencing what was obviously a lot of pain and mental anguish. It looked like a panel out of a comic strip that Satan might have found funny.
“It’s by Picasso,” Alf informed us. “For me, it’s always been one of the all-time great works of art.”
Alf strode to the center of the room and waved his hand over a desk. Guernica disappeared. The eBay auction for the zucchini crayon appeared in its place.
“Whoa,” said Freak.
The painting was now a gigantic computer screen. Alf moved his hand slightly in the air above the desk and the image scrolled down to the latest bid. The high bid was still $11,000. Alecto was still in the lead.
“That’s not good,” said Alf quietly.
“This is very high tech,” observed Freak.
“Some of it is not yet commercially available, yes,” Alf agreed.
I studied the desk. It had the same dragon-claw feet as the sofa. Four other pieces of furniture in the room had the same kind of feet. Freak was right. The sofa was part of a set.
“What’s not good?” Fiona asked.
“The fact that GORLAB hasn’t put in a counterbid since this morning. It could mean he’s exploring other means of acquiring the crayon.”
“Like what?”
“Like stealing it. Did you bring it?”
Freak nodded, but otherwise didn’t move a muscle.
“May I see it?” Alf snapped.
Freak slid his hand into the cigar box without opening the lid too far. He withdrew the crayon and held it up.
“What else have you got in there?” Alf nodded at the box.
Freak grudgingly flipped it open.
“Oh,” said Alf. “You found all this between the sofa cushions? You could have told me you had the sock.”
Alf sat down and pulled off his right shoe, revealing a bare foot. He grabbed the sock and started to wiggle into it.
“What should I do with the crayon?” asked Freak, trying not to stare at an adult doing something completely bizarre.
“Put it back in the box. I just wanted to make sure you had it. And the double-six domino? Double-sixes are lucky.” Alf paused mid-sock-wiggle. He grabbed the domino out of the box, looked at Freak, looked at me, nodded slightly, and tucked the domino into my T-shirt pocket. “If I were you, I would carry it with me at all times. It’s lucky, like a four-leaf clover.” He yanked up his newly returned sock and reached for his shoe.
“What about the coin?” asked Freak.
“The coin?” said Alf, as if he were unaware of its existence. He looked back in the box. “Oh, the coin. Yes. That’s lucky, too.” He plucked the coin from the box and handed it to Freak. “That can be your lucky piece. Carry it with you at all times.”
I got the impression Alf was humoring Freak. Freak didn’t seem to notice. He tucked the coin into his pants pocket.
“So, Mr. Alf,” I said, eager to get back to the reason we were there, “you seem to know who the bidders are in the auction.”
“Let’s just say I have strong suspicions.” Alf finished tying his shoe and stood up. “Ah. That feels much better. And it’s just Alf, please.”
He waved his hand over his desk and Guernica reappeared. The painting didn’t glow the way a computer screen would. It looked like a real painting. I wasn’t entirely sure the technology was available even non-commercially.
“One of the bidders, I am absolutely certain,” said Alf, “is a man named Edward M. Disin.”
“Why is that name familiar?” asked Fiona.
“It’s the name of the place where my aunt works,” I said. “The Edward M. Disin Medical Center.”
“Yes,” agreed Alf. “Disin, and the very powerful company he controls, the Disin Corporation, put up the money to build the center. They’ve also donated cutting-edge computers and electronics to the Cheshire school system, the fire department, and the police.”
“Generous,” I said.
“Perhaps.” Alf pinched the air above his desk. Guernica disappeared again. It was replaced with an aerial view of rolling countryside. Alf wiggled his fingers and the picture zoomed in on a charcoal-gray blotch of land surrounded by vibrant autumn colors.
“Recognize this?” he asked.
“That’s Hellsboro,” Fiona said immediately.
“Yes. Hellsboro. The reason Edward M. Disin is so generous to your little town of Cheshire.”