Sunday was chilly and bright. I met up with Freak and Fiona at the Underhill gate shortly after twelve o’clock. The gate snapped shut behind us as soon as we were in. I looked back through the iron bars and watched a big black car drive slowly by. It might have been tourists looking for a glimpse of Hellsboro. People sometimes came looking. It didn’t take long for most to realize that watching an underground fire was about as exciting as watching a submarine race from the beach.
I couldn’t see any bruises on Freak, so I thought maybe his father had calmed down once the two of them had gone into the house the previous night. Fiona and I had lingered, pressing ourselves against the back wall of the house, listening for sounds of an argument. We hadn’t heard any. I was impressed that Fiona had stood up to Mr. Nesterii. I was ashamed that I hadn’t.
“You did enough heroic stuff for one day,” Fiona had consoled me after I confided in her. “You can’t expect to be a hero all the time.”
“I don’t see why not,” I’d said. River Man was always supposed to be there when you needed him. He always got his feet wet. He always waded right in.
The three of us walked up the center of the driveway, no longer caring if we were seen from above, and Alf met us at the servants’ entrance. “Good. You wore old clothes. I can guarantee you’re going to get dirty.”
He led us through the house. At one point I thought I heard the sound of an ax striking wood. I spun around quickly, but saw nothing. Freak and Fiona didn’t seem to notice.
A set of double doors in the main entry hall opened into a large room with many French doors along one side and a cobweb-covered chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. Furniture draped with dusty bedsheets lined the opposite wall. The room was almost as big as the gymnasium back at school. A hundred people could have danced in it easily.
“This was a grand house in its day,” said Alf. He was wearing blue jeans and a gray pullover sweater with a bit of white T-shirt visible at the neck. He looked like someone you might run into in downtown Cheshire.
“You’re wearing twenty-first-century clothing,” I observed.
“It’s how I usually dress,” Alf acknowledged. “The clothing I was wearing when I first met you I found in one of the cedar closets upstairs. Possibly belonged to Underhill’s father. I thought wearing it might convey a feeling of lovable eccentricity.”
“It didn’t.”
“I sensed as much.”
In the center of the ballroom were three stepladders and a table covered with cleaning supplies. “We have until Saturday to make the ballroom presentable,” Alf reminded us. “I also want the foyer cleaned and then furnished with some pieces I’ve found in the attic. If you spread the work out over the next six days, we should be in good shape by the night of the auction.” Alf turned to Fiona. “What kind of response are we getting to the auction invitations?”
Fiona’s fingers tap-danced on her phone until her e-mail showed up. She turned the screen so that Alf could see it.
“WaxLips is coming,” she informed us. “He wanted to know if there would be refreshments. As soon as I said yes, he confirmed he would be here.”
“I suspect,” said Alf, gently taking the phone from her and thumbing through the entries, “whoever Lips is, he or she lives fairly close and will be attending solely for the food. I see the Rochester Toy Museum will be sending a representative. They seem a bit annoyed that telephone bidding will not be allowed. And—ahh! GORLAB appears to be a sheik of the Unaligned Emirates. That could easily be Edward Disin, traveling in disguise as a wealthy Arab toy collector.”
“We haven’t heard from Alecto yet,” Fiona said.
“I am sure we will, considering how enthusiastically she was bidding when the auction was online. Good work.”
Alf started to hand the phone back to Fiona, but Freak intercepted it, turned his back to Fiona, and began scrolling through her mail.
“GIVE ME THAT!”
“I want to see the GORLAB thing,” Freak started to explain, but Fiona was all over him. She grabbed the phone, but Freak wouldn’t let go. He yanked one way, she yanked the other, and one of her yanks sent the phone flying through the air. It hit the floor and disappeared beneath one of the bedsheet-covered pieces of furniture. Fiona threw herself down on the floor in front of it and flailed her arms under it in a desperate search. She found nothing. Not even dust bunnies.
“YOU’VE LOST MY PHONE!” she screeched.
“You’re the one who lost it,” Freak corrected her.
“It was remiss of me not to have taken it away myself,” I heard Alf say under his breath. “What was I thinking?” Then, in a much louder voice, “I’m sure it will turn up! Searching for it will be good motivation to clean the room thoroughly. Why don’t you get started? I’ll be back in a bit. I have to call a man about some balloons.”
He left as Fiona began sputtering about how her life would be ruined if she didn’t get her phone back.
“You’re aware that that phone has turned you into a zombie, aren’t you?” Freak asked her. “That, and your enthusiasm for Agra Nation® Home-Style Alphabet Soup? ‘The soup that puts a spell on you’?” he added, quoting the TV commercial.
“Obviously, the damage has already been done,” she snapped back at him. “If what you tell me is true and I’m singing along with everybody else in the flash mobs.”
“But maybe the damage can be reversed,” I said, pulling the sheet off the piece of furniture under which Fiona’s phone had vanished.
The sofa was there, looking smug. I flipped the cushion that should have had the bloodstain on it. The cushion was clean, and the slash along the back was gone.
“It’s no longer dressed as a pirate,” I said.
“The ghost costume is much better,” said Freak, nodding at the sheet in my hand.
“GIVE ME BACK MY CELL PHONE!” said Fiona, and she punched the sofa in the middle of its three seat cushions. Her fist sank into the cushion up to her wrist and when she drew her hand back, the cushion came with it. She looked like a cartoon character with a mallet for a fist.
“Get it off me!” she hollered. Freak and I grabbed the cushion and pulled one way while Fiona pulled the other. For a brief moment I envisioned Fiona spending the rest of her life as Pillow-Hand Girl in a circus freak show. Then the cushion let go and she fell backward on her butt.
“Definitely the same sofa,” Freak acknowledged as I returned the cushion to its place. It was impossible to tell Fiona’s fist had ever been in it.
“You put the OAF in SOFA!” Fiona spat at it. “How can I live without my cell?”
“Maybe if you don’t use it for a few days, you won’t feel like jumping up and singing show tunes when everybody else does,” I said. “We know the next flash mob is scheduled for Wednesday at twelve seventeen. That’s three days from now. Do you think you could go without using your cell for that long?”
Fiona hugged herself tightly and bit her lip. “I suppose I could try.”
“Freak and I will help you,” I assured her. “If you feel the need to talk to your friends, try talking to us.”
“Or if we’re not around you could just hold a bar of soap to the side of your head,” Freak suggested.
There was a sound like whuff! from behind us and we turned around.
The sofa was gone.
“Whoa!” said Freak.
“Told you.” I nudged Fiona. “You shouldn’t have called it an oaf. You hurt its feelings.”
“Furniture doesn’t have feelings,” she protested, surveying the empty spot like she still expected to find her cell.
“The sofa does,” I said. “It feels…”
“What?”
“Comfy.”
Over the course of the next week, Fiona got more and more sullen and argumentative. Freak and I guessed it was because she didn’t have her phone. She could have borrowed one from any of the kids at school, but she was using her willpower not to. I didn’t admit it to Freak, but I admired her for that.
On Monday, for the first time ever, Fiona sat with Freak and me at our school lunch table. She said she hadn’t used a cell in over twenty-four hours, but her resolve was weakening and she needed our support. When she started shaking too badly, Freak gave her an unopened can of sardines, which she clutched eagerly and held to the side of her head.
On Tuesday Fiona looked ashen. She sat on both her hands and spoke in single-word sentences.
Wednesday, at exactly twelve seventeen, almost everybody in the lunchroom stood up and faced east. Freak and I watched, horrified, as Fiona joined them. Maybe the mind control wasn’t reversible. Maybe we were all doomed.
The brainwashed student body patted the tops of their heads with their left hands and rubbed their stomachs with their right. Then they started to rub their heads with their right hands and pat their stomachs with their left. Fiona fell out of sync. She looked increasingly confused, until her eyes suddenly focused and she sat down abruptly.
I’m sure she would have texted “OMG!” if she’d had something to text with.
“Turkey,” said Freak, looking straight at her.
“Excuse me?”
“Cold turkey,” replied Freak. “That’s what it’s called when somebody suddenly quits something they’re addicted to. It’s not easy. My father hasn’t been able to do it. You did.” Freak’s eyes darted around, looking at everybody as they sang. “It’s something to be proud of.”
“So nobody has to be enslaved by Disin’s mind control,” I said. “The effects can be reversed.”
“Yeah,” said Freak, frowning. “All they have to do is go without their phones for three days. How likely is that?”
Fiona climbed up on the lunch table and looked around. She spotted Nails Norton, the girl who had dumped strawberry Jell-O on her, four tables away. Nails was belting out, “Anything you can do, I can do better!” at the top of her lungs.
Fiona jumped down from the table, swept everything off her lunch tray, and headed straight for Nails. Along the way, she scooped up bowls of Jell-O from other kids’ trays and emptied them onto the one she was carrying. When she reached Nails, Fiona dipped her finger in the gelatin and dabbed the letter L on Nails’s forehead as Nails continued to sing. Then Fiona replaced Nails’s chair with the tray of Jell-O. The flavor of the day was raspberry.
By the time the song ended, Fiona had already returned to her seat. As everybody sat back down, there was a loud splat! and a scream from Nails’s direction. This was followed by the loudest round of applause ever.
Nails scrambled to her feet. Her formerly white pants now had a bright red stain on the seat. Her face turned the same shade of red. She grabbed a sweater from one of her friends and tied it around her waist.
“Anything she can do, I can do better,” Fiona declared, and helped herself to one of Freak’s french fries.
At Underhill House that week, things were pretty tame—until Thursday rolled around.
On Saturday we had cleaned the ballroom’s ceiling and the chandelier. Sunday we washed all of the glass in the French doors. After school on Monday we scrubbed down the walls. Tuesday we washed the floor. We stepped outside as frequently as we could, shaking out dust rags, snapping towels, and jumping around like two-year-olds to convince anybody watching from above that the place was swarming with kids. Yesterday we saw a distant black helicopter overhead.
Finally, this afternoon we decorated the ballroom, putting tablecloths on tables and setting up eighty folding chairs facing a stage that, long ago, had held musicians. We stretched streamers from the arms of the chandelier to the four walls until the ceiling looked like the underside of a colorful tent.
“We still have the balloons to inflate,” said Alf. “But that can wait until Saturday.”
“Shouldn’t we start that now?” said Fiona. “Is there a helium tank? I’m very good at filling them without breaking them. Do we have enough to make an arch? Can we tie bunches to each chair? Are they different colors?” Fiona had been energized ever since she’d gotten over the painful withdrawal of giving up her phone. She stood straighter and worked harder. Freak and I could barely keep up.
“There are two different colors.” Alf sighed, overwhelmed by Fiona’s newfound energy. “And we’ll do it Saturday.”
“Are all these things really necessary?” demanded Freak, taping a Halloween party decoration to the wall.
“We have to convince Disin this is a real auction,” I assured him. We had managed to resist the temptation to tell Alf we knew about Indorsia and Miranda and that Edward Disin was his father. It would have made things easier, but it also would have revealed to Alf that Guernica and Miranda were working behind his back, putting us in more jeopardy than he was comfortable with.
“Yes,” confirmed Alf, tapping the Halloween decoration lightly on its pitchfork. “The devil is in the details.”
Alf left us on our own then. He had been leaving us for longer and longer stretches as his trust in our ability to work unsupervised grew. I assumed Guernica was continuing to fake the telemetry coming from Double Six. Alf could see we were in his house. True telemetry from Double Six might have placed us halfway to Harrisburg, or wherever it was the cat had gone. Nobody had seen Mucus since he took off with the domino.
We had the run of the first floor of the house. When we weren’t in the ballroom, we were usually in the kitchen, rinsing out our mops and dust rags. When we took breaks, we took them outside.
During one of our breaks, I said, “Why don’t we make snow angels?”
“Because there’s no snow?” Freak asked reasonably.
“That wouldn’t stop a toddler,” I said, throwing myself flat on my back, staring into the clear blue sky, and thrashing my arms through the grass.
“He’s right,” said Fiona, throwing herself down next to me and doing the same. “Seen from above, this has to make us look totally preschool.”
“Great,” said Freak, joining us. “Afterward, we can build a no man. Or a no fort. Or maybe have a no ball fight. Or we could go—”
“Okay!” Fiona interrupted him, before he could say “no boarding.” “We get it.”
Later that day, as I was coming out of the kitchen with a bucket of soapy water, I stepped on a doghat.
The doghat wasn’t on the doghat’s head. The hat was off to one side of the hallway floor, like maybe it had been tucked into a back pocket and fallen out without its owner realizing. It looked like a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle. I raced back to the ballroom.
“There’s a cockapoo in the building!” I hissed in a loud whisper.
“It was probably left by the raccoon,” said Freak, who was up on a ladder, polishing prisms in the chandelier. “You didn’t step in it, did you?”
“No. I mean, yes! Look!” I waved the hat at him. He slid down the ladder. Fiona rushed over.
“Did we leave the door open again?” asked Freak.
“No,” said Fiona. “I’m positive we closed it.”
“Then this guy snuck in some other way. I wonder what he’s up to.”
“He’s probably hoping to steal the crayon,” suggested Fiona. “Maybe it’s Edward Disin!”
“Disin wouldn’t be wearing a cockapoo hat. He certainly wouldn’t drop it in the hall. He’s too smart for that.”
“If he’s so smart,” I said, “how come he hires such stupid henchmen?”
“Shh!” said Fiona. There had been a sound from the hall.
The ballroom’s double doors were wide open. A shadow against the hall’s opposite wall told us that someone was approaching.
“Hide!” hissed Freak.
We threw ourselves under a long tablecloth-covered table and peeked out through a gap in the cloth.
Cockapoo loomed in the doorway. He was a tall man dressed all in black and holding a water pistol. Whatever kind of liquid shot out of the pistol probably contained something you had to be vaccinated against.
He walked slowly into the room and stopped next to our table, nearly stepping on my hand. We froze as he stuck the pistol into a shoulder holster and picked up one end of the tablecloth.
We were totally exposed. He had found us.
He didn’t see us. He was using the end of the tablecloth to polish the lens of a camera he had pulled from his jacket.
After a moment he walked to the center of the room and started taking pictures. Most likely, I thought, to help Edward Disin plan his escape from the crayon auction.
Then the doghat pulled out another device and walked the length of the ballroom, holding it over his head. When a red light on it started blinking, Cockapoo fiddled with the molding around one of the room’s decorative wall panels.
After a few seconds, the panel slid aside. Cockapoo disappeared through it.
“I dusted that entire wall,” whispered Fiona. “If I had known to look for a secret passage—”
“You wouldn’t have found it,” Freak finished for her. “Come on!”
We followed Freak as he slipped out from under the table. We scurried out of the room on all fours, only standing up after we had rounded the corner. Then we leaned cautiously around the edge of the doorway and looked back into the room.
“One of us should go find Alf,” said Freak.
“That was too close,” I said.
“I’ll say,” said Fiona.
“Tch-tch,” said the lady with the ax.
We turned. She was standing right behind us. She raised the ax and lunged.
We bolted back into the ballroom.