Always October (9 page)

“Fantabulastic,” she said, in a hushed voice.

The picture is strange, by most people's standards, so it was no surprise Lily liked it. It shows a huge mansion at night, the towers lit from behind by a full moon. A light shines from one window. A dragon is coiled around one of the towers.

“It was painted by Tia,” I said.

“I wonder if it has any secret messages,” replied Lily.

“Not that anyone has ever hinted at,” I said. “Dad told me about the picture in the hall—I just never figured it out. Come on, let's try this key.”

I had moved to the door that opened on the stairs to the next level. When Lily joined me, I passed her the baby, then inserted the key in the lock.

It turned easily.

The door swung open without a sound.

The stairwell was dark, but not so dark you couldn't see a scattering of cobwebs. I started up the steps.

“Wait a minute, Jake,” said Lily. “There's something weird here.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“I'm not sure. Something doesn't look right to me. Wait, I've got it! Look at the cobwebs.”

“So? I'll get something to take them down if you want, but there aren't that many …”

My voice trailed off.

“Exactly,” said Lily softly. “There aren't that many. I don't know how many cobwebs are likely to build up over a quarter of a century, but I bet it's more than we're seeing right now. Someone has been coming up here.”

“But not recently,” I said, “or there wouldn't be any at all.”

“Like, maybe not for two years or so?” asked Lily gently.

I looked at the stairwell again. Had my father worked out the puzzle in Tia's picture and found his way up here?

“Let's keep going,” said Lily.

I nodded and led the way.

“It's glorious!” gasped Lily when we entered the tower's top room.

I had to admit she was right. The curved walls had big windows that featured a great view of the cemetery. Between them stood bookshelves crammed with my grandfather's books as well as a massive collection of supernatural and horror fiction from other writers and at least two hundred books on myth, legend, and folklore.

The centerpiece of the room was an enormous desk.

“I've heard about this,” I said, going to stand behind the desk. “After Arthur's career took off, he had it handmade especially for this room.”

Ten feet long, the desk faced the windows and was curved to match the curve of the walls. On top of it sat a primitive computer. I guess Arthur had abandoned his typewriter a year or two before he abandoned his family.

A light coating of dust covered the desk's surface. Running a finger through it, Lily said, “If this is twenty-five years' worth of dust, then I'm Dracula's daughter.”

The desk had seven drawers—a center drawer, right in front of where you would sit, and three drawers on either side of the kneehole.

“Shall we?” I asked.

“How can we not?” Lily replied with a grin.

We started with the center drawer. It contained nothing except the usual writer's tools—pens, pencils, erasers, paper clips, a box of staples, and so on.

The drawers on the right side were all empty, as were the top two drawers on the left. But when I opened the bottom drawer on that side, Lily murmured, “Pay dirt!”

Carefully I lifted out the items we had discovered: two notebooks and a sheaf of papers.

“Maps!” cried Lily, grabbing the papers. “I bet your grandfather drew these to help him keep things straight as he wrote more stories about Always October. He should have published them in one of the books. That would have been cooler than Frankenstein's pink pajamas!”

She looked at them more closely, then scowled.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“The place names are all in some kind of code.” She set them aside. “Let's look at the notebooks!”

The first one was facedown. I turned it over and felt a chill run along my spine. Written on the front in my father's clear, distinct handwriting were the words
Always October
. But when I opened it, I felt the same frustration that Lily had in looking at the maps. It was written in code! I flipped through it, hoping to find something I could read, and toward the end, I did. It wasn't part of the notebook itself, rather a handwritten note that had been slipped between two of the pages. The words struck my heart like a hammer:

“It's your grandfather's farewell note,” whispered Lily.

“Has to be,” I said, forcing the words past the lump in my throat. “But
what
does it mean? Is it a suicide note?”

Lily shook her head. “Hard to tell. The ‘mystery'
could
mean the world beyond this life. But it could just as easily refer to some earthly mystery instead.”

We opened the second notebook. It was also in code. However, even in code it was clear that this was written by the same hand that had done that farewell note.

Lily gasped.

“What?” I asked.

“I should have spotted it with your father's book, but it just hit me. Don't you recognize those symbols?”

I felt like an idiot. “That silver disk!” I cried. I pulled it out of my pocket.

“It's a code key!” said Lily excitedly. “This is what your grandfather was talking about—
it's the key to the family mystery!
It's got to be the way to translate those notebooks. Oh! I just realized something. Hand it to me, will you?”

I passed it over. Lily ran her finger around the edge, and I saw her lips moving as she counted the symbols.

“Twenty-six,” she said triumphantly. “Same as the letters in the alphabet.”

It seemed so simple. But it wasn't. The obvious answer was to match the top symbol to “A” and then just go around the dial matching the rest of the alphabet. We tried that with the first few words of my father's notebook and got total nonsense.

“It's here,” said Lily firmly. “I'm sure of it. You know I love this kind of stuff, Jake. And I'm good at it. Will you let me take it, and one of the notebooks, and see what I can do?”

I hesitated. This was definitely a job for Lily's puzzle brain. But I didn't really want to pass it over to her. It didn't feel right somehow.

“Let me work with it tonight,” I said. “If I don't get anywhere, I'll hand it over to you tomorrow.”

Her face fell, but she nodded and said, “Okay, that's fair.”

The next day I handed the code key, my father's notebook, and three of the maps to Lily.

“Take it,” I said bitterly. “I almost broke my brain trying to figure it out. I hope you have better luck than I did!”

Then I went to the library and used a school computer to check the exact date of the coming full moon. I wanted to know in advance when LD was likely to make his next transformation. It was a relief when I discovered it would occur on a Friday night, since I knew that if LD did have another transformation, I would be too wired to go to school the next day.

Things got more complicated that same afternoon, when Mom said, “I've decided to go to the National Fibers Conference, Jake. I hate to do it, especially now, what with the baby and all. But it's my best chance to pick up some new commissions and we really need the money. Mrs. McSweeney has offered to stay with you and LD while I'm gone.”

I blinked, then asked, “When are you leaving?”

“I head out next Friday and get back late Sunday night. Jacob? Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Fine.”

That wasn't true, of course, but I couldn't figure out any way to tell her that I suspected LD might turn into a monster again that same Friday night. When I thought about it, I decided maybe it was just as well Mom wouldn't be here. If anyone could handle a baby monster, it was probably Mrs. McSweeney. She was as tough as anyone I'd ever met.

Two nights after Mom told me about the fibers conference, something started howling in the distance after the sun went down.

“What was that?” I cried the first time I heard it.

“Probably just a neighbor's dog,” said Mom, looking up from her loom. “Or maybe a coyote,” she added after a moment, plucking a strand of blue yarn from the pile she was working with. “I've heard they've started to move back into the area.”

When I asked Lily if she had heard the howls, she nodded vigorously, adding, “Grampa says he thinks it's wolves. I like the sound.”

Then she sang a brief song about the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood.

The howling continued, louder and closer every night.

W
e heard the howling too, and I could tell that it was making my grandfather nervous.

As for me, all I could think about was trying to crack the code. I knew the secret was in that silver disk, but I couldn't tease it out. I tried matching every other letter to the ring of symbols, going
A
,
C
,
E
around the edge and then starting over with
B
,
D
,
F
, and so on. I tried doing the alphabet backward. I was positive, or at least almost positive, that the symbols matched the alphabet. But how, and in what order?

The one thing that puzzled me was that the moon symbols—the two full and two half circles—would pop up in the written pages sometimes.

It took me longer than it should have to figure it out, but I finally cracked the code on Wednesday night when I realized that the moon figures were signs, telling me where to set the code key!

For example, when the black circle appeared in the notebook, I would set the arrow so that it pointed toward the black circle on the code key. The symbol in the outer ring just above that became
A
, and the alphabet marched around the code key in that order. When a different moon symbol appeared, say the half moon that bulged to the right, I would reset the arrow, and the symbol it pointed at then became the new
A
.

Even after I figured this out, the work was slow and painstaking.

It was also spine tingling.

I couldn't wait to report to Jacob the next day. What I had read was so sensational, I had a hard time keeping the top of my head from blowing off!

“What is going on with you?” asked Jacob when we got to the cemetery the next afternoon. “You've been twitchy as a mouse at the Cat Convention all day.”

I took a deep breath, then said, “I think it's real.”

Jacob scowled at me. “
What's
real?”

“
Always October!
I think it's real, Jake! I know your father thought it was real. He figured out how to open the safe, just like we did. He cracked the code and read your grandfather's journal. I don't know what's in there for sure, since I only had your dad's to work with. What I do know is that your dad started trying to find a way to get to Always October, because he believed that's where your grandfather went. He talks about someone named Mazrak. It's kind of spooky. He says things like, ‘Mazrak says blood calls to blood' and ‘Am I on the right track, or simply losing my mind?' and …”

I hesitated.

“And what?” demanded Jake.

“The last entry—I skipped ahead, because the translating is really slow work—the last entry says, ‘Mazrak wants me to go to the cave.'”

Jake turned pale.

The next day in school, Friday, I watched Jake grow more anxious with every passing hour. He blew the math test, which was no surprise. I mean, really, how could a boy with a baby monster on his hands concentrate on how many quarters Eugene owed Penelope if she sold him thirty-two percent of her lemonade stand? Even so, it did nothing to improve his mood.