It didn’t seem fair that in addition to doghats, and mind control, and Edward Disin, we also had to deal with something as unscientific as a ghost.
The old lady chased us unscientifically into the ballroom. The French doors were open, to air the place out, and we raced toward them, skating on a floor we had waxed less than an hour earlier. I slipped, fell on my back, and looked up to see the old lady’s ax rushing down at me like a guillotine blade.
Just because the ax had passed harmlessly through us the first time didn’t mean it would happen that way again. Maybe ghostly axes passed through you sometimes and maybe sometimes they didn’t. We weren’t eager to find out. Freak grabbed me by the foot, sliding me to the right, and the ax whizzed by my ear. Fiona grabbed my hand and helped me to my feet, and the three of us dove for the open doors, only to have the old lady materialize in our path. She shrieked and swung her ax maniacally at us, barely missing our necks.
We screamed, turned, and ran the other way. I collided with a stepladder, and a bucket of soapy water came crashing down from the top, splashing across the floor and making the slippery surface even slicker. We ran in place just to keep from falling, and the lady shot in like a homicidal hockey player to mow us down.
Freak got traction and pushed Fiona and me ahead of him. We skidded across the ballroom and headed for the open panel where Cockapoo had disappeared.
We collided with him as he was coming out.
He was knocked back into the secret passage, and Freak and Fiona went sprawling on the floor in front of it. Not being quite as fast as they were, I was the one who was still standing when Cockapoo popped back out. So I was the one he aimed his water pistol at.
“Looks like somebody could use a dose of Hista Mime!” he snarled.
Hista Mime! The Silent Killer! One drop of it on my skin and I would suffocate, unable to call out, convinced I was trapped in an airless glass box!
He took a step toward me, a menacing smirk on his face, and pulled the trigger just as the old lady appeared to his right and swung her ax at his outstretched hand. He let out a yelp and turned to fire at her, the liquid from his gun’s first shot still arcing through the air at me.
I dove out of the way just in time as the last of the liquid from the pistol passed right through the ghost. It spattered on the floor and sizzled, turning the polished stone a sickly shade of gray. The ghost roared at him, swinging her ax even more insanely.
Cockapoo broke away from her and ran. He headed for the French doors with Ax Lady swinging at his back, crossed the patio, and jumped the hedge at the patio’s edge. He quickly disappeared into the woods beyond. Freak and I stumbled to the French doors and watched him go.
Ax Lady had vanished the moment she got to the doors. I spun around quickly, expecting her to show up behind us. But the ballroom was empty.
“Where’s Fiona?” asked Freak, looking around wildly.
We raced back to the secret passage, where we found Fiona standing in the center of a small room, hugging herself. She was looking at a revivarium. It was one of the coffin-like cylinders that could be used to clone a new person or to put the mind of one person into the body of another. We had seen four of them in the men’s room at Rodmore Chemical.
“Would you say that’s my size?” Fiona asked, nodding at the thing.
“I’d say anybody could fit in there,” said Freak. “Miranda made it pretty clear she’s against Alf’s idea of reviving her by putting her mind into your head. I think Alf regrets he ever thought of it in the first place.”
“Miranda could be lying,” replied Fiona. “And Alf may still be toying with the idea. It might explain why he seems to be of two minds when it comes to telling us anything.”
“Double Six says we have to decide who we can trust,” I reminded them. “I say we trust Alf.” When Freak gave me a look, I added, “And we watch one another’s backs.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Freak said, exiting the room and pulling Fiona along with him.
I held back for a moment. The revivarium was the biggest thing in the room. Tables and benches lined the walls, littered with everything from electronic gear and chemicals to floor wax and garbage bags. I put my hand on the revivarium. The palm of my hand tingled where I touched it. I was pretty sure I could hear a faint hum. I got the impression the revivarium might be running at some low level. Doing what, I had no idea.
I shivered and followed my friends back through the panel. No sooner had Freak finished sliding the panel back into place than Alf came striding into the ballroom. I pretended to polish the panel with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Freak kicked me and I stopped.
“I don’t wish to alarm you,” said Alf, oblivious to what had just happened, “but Guernica informs me we may have an intruder. There’s been a car parked on Breeland for the past twenty minutes. I want you to stay right here while I search the place.”
“Don’t bother,” Freak told him. “It was a doghat. Maybe a cockapoo.” Freak pointed to where I had dropped the doghat’s doghat. “He went running out those doors a couple of minutes ago.”
“The three of you scared him away?” Alf sounded unconvinced.
“Actually,” I said, “it was your ghost who scared him. You do know your house is haunted?”
“It’s not,” said Alf.
“A little old lady? With an ax? And a detachable jaw?”
“Oh. Gram.”
“She’s your grammy?”
“Hologrammy. Yes. That’s what I call her. She’s a hologram. I modeled her after my father’s mother. He was always scared to death of her.”
“I can see why,” I said.
“Oh, I exaggerated some things. She never used an ax. She preferred poisoned daggers. Hologrammy was my early attempt at a security system. She was supposed to scare intruders away. Even from the start, she behaved erratically. Then the part of Guernica that controlled her got damaged.”
“Lost in a fire?” I said. I had put two and two together: The missing hassock had been in charge of Hologrammy.
“Why would you say that?” asked Alf suspiciously.
“I have an overactive imagination.”
“Well, it was a good guess. It was a fire. And I haven’t seen Hologrammy since. Otherwise, I would have warned you about her. But now something seems to have reactivated her. Maybe the three of you.”
“Or maybe the doghat,” said Freak.
“Right,” said Alf. “The doghat. We should get up to the gallery and see what Guernica can tell us about our intruder.”
Guernica replayed the gate-camera footage for us. The doghat had pole-vaulted over the front gate, collided with a low-hanging tree branch, landed on his head, and driven away. It would have been funny, if it hadn’t been scary.
On Friday Alf presented us with waiters’ uniforms. For the auction, he wanted us dressed in starchy white shirts, black vests, and black bow ties. We tried them on and Alf drilled us on how to walk around the ballroom with serving trays full of snacks. Shoulders back, no slouching. Always determine if the guests are right-handed or left-handed, then approach them from the opposite side so they can more comfortably reach across themselves to snag their snacks. Once they’ve sucked the cheese cube or the cocktail frank off the toothpick, present them with a smaller tray for discarded toothpicks. Press a button on the underside of the tray to cause the tray to analyze the DNA in the saliva on the toothpick.
“Really?” said Freak.
“Really,” confirmed Alf. “If the DNA matches that of Edward Disin, the tray will glow. The moment that happens, you signal me, and I will signal the federal agents.”
“What if he’s not hungry?” I asked. “What if he doesn’t eat anything off a toothpick?”
“We will also be serving drinks. A used drinking glass turned upside down on the DNA tray will also register.”
“Will these be alcoholic drinks?” Freak asked.
The question caught Alf off guard.
“Yes,” he said after a pause. “But you don’t have to serve them.”
“Yeah,” said Freak. “I would prefer that.”
When I got home that evening, my aunt gave me the photographs I had asked her to get developed. There was an okay picture of me shaking hands with a guy dressed like Benjamin Franklin; and a pretty funny one of Freak looking guilty in front of the Liberty Bell, like he was the one who had put the crack in it; and three completely dark, blurry, useless pictures taken in the basement of Rodmore Chemical that could just as easily have been taken inside one of my socks.
Our dangerous trip to the heart of Hellsboro had gotten us nothing.
When I showed the pictures to Freak and Fiona, Freak kicked the wall and Fiona pouted. The three of us agreed: If we had any hopes of stopping Edward Disin, it had to be by getting him arrested at the auction. We certainly had nothing to prove an unearthly portal existed in the basement of his chemical factory.
Saturday afternoon. The day of the auction. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Freak and I were as hyper as Fiona had been ever since she’d quit her phone, and the three of us followed Alf around like cartwheeling monkeys, trying to make sure everything was perfect—polishing glasses, rearranging chairs, tugging tablecloths back and forth. Alf finally took us outside to help inflate the balloons.
He’d been correct about there being two colors: one for each.
Both balloons were on the patio, just outside the ballroom’s French doors. Each was stuffed in its own canvas bag, leaning against its own wicker basket.
“Hot air balloons,” said Fiona.
“Of course,” said Alf. “What other kind of balloons would we be using?”
“These are, what?” I asked. “Decorations?”
“No,” replied Alf. “They’re scarecrows.”
Alf went to the nearest bag and pulled open the drawstrings. He started pulling out yards and yards of brightly colored nylon fabric.
“The patio, and the lawn beyond it, is the only open place on the property where a helicopter might land,” he said, indicating with hand gestures that we should help him unpack the fabric and spread it over the ground. “The trees make it impossible anywhere else on the grounds, and the steep pitch of the roof makes it impossible to land on the house itself. We’re going to fill these two balloons with hot air and tether them side by side.”
“You’re expecting Disin to arrive by helicopter?” Freak asked as we teased the fabric into a large oval shape and spread it out over the grass. “Like Santa Claus at the mall?”
“I’m expecting him to arrive by automobile. I’m expecting him to try to escape by helicopter. He knows full well this is some kind of trap. But it’s the nature of Compulsive Completist Disorder that he has to be here himself. He has to be planning to have a stealth chopper handy should he need to break and run.”
“Couldn’t the helicopter drop a rope ladder?”
“Not with all these overhanging trees. Not with the balloons filling in the empty space.”
“Couldn’t a helicopter just shoot down the balloons?” I asked.
“Bullets would pass right through. You’d have to strafe to bring one of these down quickly, and that much gunfire would be too dangerous to anyone on the ground, Edward Disin included. It would also attract too much attention at a time when Disin doesn’t want anyone looking too closely at the town of Cheshire.”
“Couldn’t he escape by using one of the balloons?” asked Fiona.
“I hope he tries. Balloons can’t be steered. He’d be a sitting duck if he tried to take one. Not to mention I’ve rigged these so I can release the baskets from a distance by remote control. There are explosive bolts at each connecting clip. Should Edward Disin try to ascend in one, he’ll find himself falling back to earth very quickly.”
“The balloons are a trap,” I said astutely.
“They are a contingency plan, should the Feds have difficulty getting handcuffs on him.”
We helped Alf inflate the first balloon, using ropes to secure its basket to stakes in the ground and then using a large electric fan to fill the nylon part—Alf called it the envelope—with air. When the envelope was half full, we heated the air in it with a propane-powered burner. The hot air caused the envelope to rise.
After about half an hour, the fully inflated balloon loomed over me like Morgue MacKenzie demanding all my lunch money.
We walked away from it and looked back so we could see it more clearly. It was a bright, orangey red.
“I’ve seen this balloon before,” said Fiona.
We all had. Huge words in old-fashioned lettering appeared on its side. They said STATE FAIR OMAHA.
“It’s a replica of the balloon seen at the end of the movie The Wizard of Oz,” Alf acknowledged. “I bought it from the owners, who are big Judy Garland fans.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s get the other one up.”
The other balloon wasn’t in the conventional shape of a balloon. This became obvious as soon as we spread the envelope out on the ground. The white fabric stretched out in a weird L shape.
“There are hot air balloons in the shape of Noah’s Ark, the Taj Mahal, and George Washington’s head,” Alf said, starting up the fan. The stark white envelope began to stir. “There’s a famous one of a pig with wings.”
“What is this one in the shape of?” I asked.
After a while the envelope rose into the air. It still had some folds and floppy parts that made it hard to see what it was.
“It’s some kind of chair,” said Freak.
“It’s a big, puffy throne,” said Fiona.
“Get some distance,” suggested Alf.
As we ran out to the side, the hot air in the envelope filled out the remaining kinks and the balloon assumed its finished shape.
“It’s a toilet,” I announced.
It was a huge toilet bowl complete with a flush tank and a clearly visible flush lever. It must have been six stories high. The drainpipe was the hole in the bottom that the hot air rose up through. The basket dangled beneath the drainpipe.
“Its registered name is Porcelain Cloud,” Alf said, coming up beside us. “But everybody calls it the Dear John, after the name of the company that originally commissioned it. Dear John, before it went out of business, was a supplier of portable privies to construction sites, county fairs, and balloonist conventions. I was able to get the balloon cheap when they were forced to liquidate their assets. And trust me, you don’t want to be anywhere near a portable privy company when they’re liquidating their assets.”
The three of us stared upward, our mouths hanging open.
“Obviously designed by a man,” Fiona finally said, and started to walk away.
“How do you know?” asked Freak.
Fiona tossed her head.
“The seat is up.”