Brainboy and the Deathmaster (12 page)

But he soon stopped. Sitting there surrounded by his six satiny pillows, with twelve hundred movies and ten times that many songs at his fingertips, he began to feel lonely. Maybe it was because the movie
was
a comedy: laughing wasn’t so much fun by yourself. Still, it
was odd, for he hadn’t felt lonely once since arriving here at Paradise, even though he’d spent more time by himself than ever before in his life.

He switched from
Meteor Fiends
to
Star Voyager.
But instead of getting swept up in the action, he thought of how it was BJ’s favorite movie, too. BJ and Mrs. Walker … why hadn’t he thought of them before? Or had he? Yes, he’d thought of them—but only as dim figures, like people he’d gone to kindergarten with or something. But now he could see BJ perfectly, in his droopy jeans and oversized T-shirt, and Mrs. Walker, with all her chins and jiggly arms and warm smile. She’d been so generous, feeding him and calling him “honey” and letting him sleep over. It had been a month since he’d seen them. Did they suppose he was dead? That he’d found a family he liked better and forgotten them?

He flicked off
Star Voyager
and stared disconsolately at the blank screen. He supposed he
had
found a new family of sorts, and
had
forgotten them. He’d never even thought of calling them. According to Mr. Masterly, Paradise Lab was in Washington State, so the call might not even be long distance, but it had never occurred to him to pick up a phone. He didn’t know their number, but they were bound to be listed.

Come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed any phones around Paradise. His room was fitted out with many
luxuries, but he was pretty sure there was no telephone. He slipped out of bed and conducted a thorough search, even going through the drawers in the dressing room. No phone. No phone jack, either.

He changed out of his pajamas and put on a black jumpsuit and black jelly shoes and slipped out into the corridor.

“Night, Darryl,” said Suki, who was just heading into room five.

“Have you seen a phone, Suki?” he asked.

“Nope. Sleep well.”

She went into her room. Darryl walked down the corridor and checked the dining hall. Hedderly had cleared the dinner dishes and sponged off the table. No sign of a phone in there.

When he stepped into the elevator, Darryl felt queasy, and as soon as the door opened to E, he hustled out. Abs was in the weightlifting area, polishing the silver weights on the bench-press machine.

“Do you know where I could find a phone, Abs?”

Abs just grinned at him, shaking his head. Darryl walked past the pool and the deserted basketball court and the track and passed under the AquaFilm archway. The house lights were down, and the skin of the tank flickered with images of a prehistoric world. No sign of a phone.

He took the emergency stairs down to L and searched every nook and cranny except Snoodles’s room. There were powerful computers, and state-of-the-art microscopes, and accelerators for subatomic particles, and X-ray defractors, and a chest full of diamonds—but no telephone. He flicked on one of the computers, thinking he might be able to email Mrs. Walker at the library. There was no Internet access.

As he peered around the deserted octagon, his breathing turned shallow. How could he have been so ungrateful after all BJ had done for him? Starting out with saving him from the switchblade of that crazy kid in the shelter. …

Boris Rizniak. By an amazing coincidence, Boris’s sister was here in Paradise. She’d said if he didn’t take the vitamin, she would be his friend. He’d had every intention of taking it: dropping it had been an accident.

Instead of waking poor Snoodles, Darryl took the stairs back up to S and went down the rosily lit corridor. He got no answer when he knocked on the door to room seven. Was Nina already asleep? Or up watching the AquaFilm?

“Night, Darryl.”

Billy O’Connor, down the corridor, was about to go into room three.

“Is the movie over, Billy?”

“Just ended. Time for bed. Tomorrow may be the great day!”

Billy disappeared into his room. Darryl tried Nina’s door. It opened. There were no locks in Paradise.

Her room looked identical to his. It appeared to be deserted.

“Nina?”

He rounded the foot of the bed. As he approached the far wall, a panel slid open, revealing a dressing room just like his.

“Nina?”

Where could she be? He went back down the corridor and, taking a deep breath, stepped into the elevator. His heart quickened as he pressed the top button, the one with the keyhole in it. Nothing happened.

Evidently there was one lock in Paradise.

He got out of the elevator and wandered back into the dining hall. Might there be a phone in the kitchen for Hedderly and the other staff members to call their families? He pushed open the swing door.

“Hi, Hedderly.”

“Hi, boyo,” said Hedderly, who was peeling potatoes.

“Is there a phone around?”

“A phone?”

“You know, a telephone.”

“Not as I know of.”

“A cell phone, maybe?”

“Not as I know of.”

“Don’t you ever call anybody?”

“Not as I know of.”

Darryl walked into the dim pantry. To his right were towering shelves of canned goods; to his left, two steel doors: one big, one small. He opened the big one—and a blast of icy air swept over him. It was a vast freezer, with sides of beef and unscaled king salmon hanging from hooks and, in the back, great vats of ice cream. He closed that door and opened the little one. Inside was a boxlike chamber, room temperature, empty.

“What do you suppose it is?” he mumbled.

“I think it’s a dumbwaiter.”

Darryl whirled around. For a moment all he could see in the far corner of the pantry were two glimmering circles, but as he peered, the circles turned into the lenses on a pair of glasses.

“That’s funny—I was hunting for you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting,” Nina said.

“For me?”

“Not exactly.”

He looked into the small chamber, then back at her.

“Where’s the waiter?”

“A dumbwaiter’s a thing, not a person. It carries
food and stuff from one floor to another. It was in one of my mom’s mysteries I read. They call it dumb because it doesn’t talk, not because it’s stupid.”

“Where’s this one go?”

“I don’t know.”

“So … what are you waiting here for?”

“Probably nothing. I waited twice before, but both times it was a bust.”

He walked over to the dark corner. Next to where she was sitting there was a vent in the wall.

“What’s that go to?”

“Have a look,” she said, pulling off the vent cover. “I may be wrong, but I think there’s only a minute to go.”

She scrunched down and pushed herself into the horizontal vent on her back, headfirst.

“There’s room for two,” she said in an echoey voice.

He scrunched down, too, and pushed himself in beside her. It was a duct that bent upward after a few feet. As his shoulders reached hers, he sneezed.

“Dusty.”

“Look up,” she said.

He blinked and looked up. A long tube, less than a yard in diameter, stretched up and up and up—a hundred feet, it must have been—ending in a small black circle. He knocked on the tube. It was made of Teflon or some other hard plastic.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s a ventilation pipe for the kitchen,” she said. “See up there a few feet? That might be where the stove hooks in.”

“But where does it go to?”

“Straight up. That’s the sky.”

“The sky? But it’s getting …”

Nina sucked in her breath as the end of tube suddenly brightened.

“What’s happening?” Darryl said.

“The moon!”

It didn’t remain in place over the end of the tube very long. Maybe a minute. But it was definitely the moon—a full one.

After it slid away, they wormed their way out of the duct, and Darryl turned away from her. She’d seen him fall on his butt that afternoon: he didn’t want her to see him crying now. For some reason, the sight of the moon had filled his eyes with tears.

He faked another sneeze, using it as an excuse to wipe his face. Then he saw that she had her glasses off and was wiping tears out of
her
eyes.

“How’d you know it would be there right then?”

“I made some calculations on one of the computers,” she said. “And I hoped.”

“Wow.”

“I wonder if Boris was looking at it at the same time. …”

She’d put her glasses back on, but dim as it was, Darryl could see that her eyes were welling up again. He suddenly felt so sorry for her, being separated from her brother, that he put an arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

“I feel strange tonight,” he said. “Different.”

“Different from before you went to the mall?”

He giggled. The mall was such a silly name for orientation.

“I was hoping to see you tonight,” she said. “I almost skipped the moon. I thought you might come by my room.”

“I did.”

“Really?”

“Do you know where there’s a phone?”

She smiled sadly. “A phone.”

“Yeah, it’s so weird. I don’t know why, but I never thought of calling my friends till now.”

Nina said nothing. She just took his hand and gave it a squeeze.

T
he noon sun was blazing when BJ locked his bike to a lamppost outside the entrance to the Seattle Yacht Club. He waited in the shade of a cherry tree. After half an hour he was starting to mutter about how the weasel was no more dependable than Darryl when a clanking sound made him whip around. There Boris stood, a green toolbox at his feet.

“Where’d that come from?”

“I grabbed it. These nimrods at the Chevron station chased me about a mile out of my way. That’s how come I’m late.”

Squatting, BJ opened the toolbox. “This is great. It’s got everything.”

“Take me to the boats, man.”

Boris looked surprisingly undisreputable in his borrowed clothes, but BJ, in cutoffs, figured it would be unwise to walk down the Yacht Club’s driveway, what with a uniformed doorman standing under the club-house awning. So they skulked around the side of the Yacht Club grounds on the narrow lane leading down to Portage Bay. On the right was a funky shop plastered
with signs advertising prices for renting boats and kayaks; on the left, the Yacht Club wall. The wall came to an end well above the water, so to reach the closest docks, all you had to do was scramble over some prickers. It was a weekday, and in spite of the balmy weather not many boats were out on the water, leaving the Yacht Club packed with sloops and yawls and ketches, cigarette boats and catamarans and cabin cruisers, Boston Whalers and three-masted schooners and a few yachts so big they had lifeboats on their decks like ocean liners.

“How about that guy?” Boris said, pointing at a cabin cruiser about fifty feet long. “The
Lazy Boy.
”

“Too big,” BJ said. “We don’t want them to call out the Coast Guard or something.”

“That one?” BJ pointed at a sleek little inboard-outboard with a fiberglass hull.

“Too flashy.”

Boris plunked down on his toolbox, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his sock, and lit up.

“What are you doing?” BJ said.

“What’s it look like? I’m having a smoke while you figure out which boat we want.”

But now that they were here, BJ couldn’t go through with it. An image of his mother had loomed up like Quadros in CastleMaster.

“Maybe we should rent,” he said.

“
Huh?
”

BJ dug nine dollars out of his pocket. “How much you got?”

“I’m busted.”

“Yeah, right. How much did they give you for Darryl’s GameMaster?”

“None of your friggin’ business. But I just about got killed getting this.’’ He patted the toolbox.

“Hide it,” BJ said, turning away.

A bell tinkled as he went in the door to the rental shop. After the bright sunlight BJ couldn’t see much in the shadowy place, but he could smell incense and varnish and soon made out an aging hippie with beads and long white hair who was varnishing one of those skinny boats they use in crew races.

“Peace, brother,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”

“I want to rent a boat.”

“How much you want to spend, brother?”

“I’ve got nine dollars.”

The bell tinkled again as Boris sidled into the shop.

“Peace, brother.”

Boris looked at the man as if he was nuts.

“One-man kayak’s eight bucks for the day,” the man said.

“Can two people fit in it?” Boris asked.

“Sorry, brother. Two-man kayak’s thirteen.”

Boris reached into his left sock and produced a crumpled five-dollar bill. “I forgot about this,” he said.

BJ took it and smoothed it out on the counter and handed over all but one dollar.

“Life vests are a buck each, brother.”

“We got our own,” said BJ.

“Kayak has to be back by six. And you have to leave a credit card.”

“We don’t have any credit cards.”

“No credit card, no boat.”

In spite of his brotherliness the old hippie was a cut-throat negotiator. Finally BJ had to get his bike and leave that and his watch, too.

The kayaks were in an open pen behind the shop: long, slender boats with scuffed fiberglass hulls and cockpits for the paddlers. BJ picked the newest-looking two-man.

“No way,” Boris said. “I ain’t going in no yellow boat.”

“Okay, you pick.”

Boris chose a red one with a black stripe. The paddles were all orange, so there could be no argument there. BJ grabbed two and lifted the front of the kayak while Boris picked up the rear. The proprietor opened a gate for them.

“You’ve kayaked before, right?” he said as they lugged the boat past him.

“Lots of times,” BJ said.

Once the gate closed behind them, the two boys carried the kayak down to the water and set it in parallel to the shore. They ditched their shoes and socks under the brambles where Boris had hidden the toolbox.

“Gross,” Boris said, stepping onto the slimy lake bottom.