Dandelion Fire (22 page)

The woman ran on her toes to the edge of the hole.

“I can't see him,” she yelled. “Hurry! He'll drown.”

Henry looked at the woman lawyer trying to walk through the grass in high heels, and then he jumped into the mudroom and shut the door.

He wondered if the door would be visible from the outside, so he locked it. But then, changing his mind, he opened it a crack and listened.

“He's not in there,” he heard a man say. “And if he is, it's not deep enough to drown in.”

“A child can drown in two inches of water,” the woman said. “How would you explain it? I clearly saw him jump.”

“I clearly stopped seeing him,” the cop muttered. “And that's more than two inches.”

“My point exactly, genius. Are you going down there or not?”

“Not.”

Henry shut the door quietly and flipped the dead bolt. He stood on his toes and peered out the window high in the door. He wasn't looking at Kansas anymore. The barn was gone, and the fields had been replaced with the endless prairie of this new world.

If he couldn't see them, he didn't think they would be able to see him. But he left the door locked. And he stood there with his left hand on the knob, thinking.

It was strange, knowing that he had a way back to what had been his home. He could open the door, step outside, and be carted back to Boston by a lawyer, attend parentally mandated therapy, and enter the next grade in the fall. He could be safe. Very protected. Too protected. He could leave and never come back. Coming back probably wouldn't even be an option once he stepped outside and the door shut behind him.

Henry swallowed and looked at the burn on his palm. Before he could see it move, he rubbed his hand on his forehead. He wanted to go back to Boston. He wanted to be done with this place, and he didn't care who he was or where his real parents were. He wanted the world to calm down and behave itself. To stop being so dangerous. He even wanted a nanny.

He told himself all of this. He told himself that he
could walk away with the scars he already had and the questions never to be answered, and he could be just fine. Everyone else? Well, wherever they were, they were together. He was on his own. He could go through life never knowing what happened to them. Never needing to know.

But none of that was true. He was lying to himself, and he knew it. He'd never been good at lying. He could feel a warm tingling on his head, sprouting off his palm. Henry lowered his arm and looked at it. This time he watched it grow and swirl.

The world was dangerous. He could be strong, or he could be weak. In Kansas or Byzanthamum. A dandelion had burned him behind a barn, had made him something else. Or he had already been something else, and the dandelion made him notice. There was no place he could go to escape the questions he had. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he walked away now, without at least trying to find out what had happened to his cousins, to his aunt and uncle and Richard. To this already strange house.

Henry wanted to know who he was. In a way, standing at that door, he was deciding who he was. He wasn't someone who could run away afraid. Not anymore.

He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. It was dry and mealy. He let his hand drop off the doorknob, and he turned away, leaving a lawyer and cop staring at a muddy puddle. Leaving the barn and Kansas and Boston. Leaving more than that.

He was hungry. In the kitchen, he tugged open the fridge and then shut it again quickly. There wasn't much in it, and what was inside was starting to smell worse than the rest of the house. He opened a few cupboards and ate a couple handfuls of dry cereal from the bottom of a box. Then he pulled out a glass and walked to the sink to get a drink. The faucet was dead.

He'd made a decision about what he didn't want to do, but that didn't get him any closer to an idea of what he should do. Unsure, he moved back into the dining room and stared out at the empty world beyond the shattered windows. He couldn't get too close in his bare feet. He picked up a can of tuna off the table and looked at it. Tuna didn't sound too bad, and the can opener had already been set out. The covers from a toaster manual and the instructions for an apple peeler had been ripped off and were pinned to the table beneath it. Handwriting covered them, wrapping around the print and illustrations.

Henry sat down, pulled the papers free, and began to grind open the tuna while he read.

Henry pried back the tuna lid and pinched out the largest lump. He knew who the man-witch had to be. He didn't know who Ken Simmons was, or how Zeke would have gotten involved.

Henry hadn't taken a bite since his first one. He pulled in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. Then he blinked twice and wiped his eyes. He read the note through again, then he set two cans of tuna beside it and put the can opener back on top.

Holding the open can, he leaned back in his chair and stared out the windows. He could get up and find a fork, but he didn't want to. He wanted to sit and think about his uncle Frank. His fingers weren't exactly clean, but he didn't care about that, either. He finished the can and set it back on the table. He decided against drinking the fish juice.

The note would have helped him, except for one thing. Grandfather's cupboard didn't lead anywhere.
But what would have changed since everyone had gone through?

He had changed. Henry closed his eyes and tried to envision what he must have done in his attic room. He had fallen face-first out of the wall and onto the end of his wet mattress. Then he had rolled and dropped and grabbed and kicked at everything he could reach. He'd nearly torn the Badon Hill door off. He must have messed up the compass locks.

Henry pushed back from the table and hurried up both flights of stairs. He kicked the fancy boots out of the way and picked his backpack up off the attic floor. Carrying it and the flashlight, he burst into his little room. The light was gone from the post-office box. He set the pack on his bed and fished out Grandfather's journals, slipped the rubber band off, and opened the first one to the diagram of the wall and the list of cupboard names. He flicked on his flashlight and spotted it on the page. He ran his eyes over the wall diagram. The center cupboard had no number. The highest number was 98. The list of names stopped at 98. He dropped the journal onto the bed and picked up the other one, flipping to the combination page. The list of combinations was only numbered to 98 as well.

Henry looked up at the wall. How could Uncle Frank have known they were going through the center cupboard? He must have. He didn't say he was guessing. Henry leaned over the bed and tugged at the door. It didn't budge.

For a long time, he stood, chewing on his lip, staring at the wall, staring at the diagram of doors and at the list of combinations. He even counted them, just to be sure. Twice. Finally, he picked up everything, turned, and made his way back downstairs and into the dining room.

He sat down and read Frank's note again, looking for any clues that he had been mistaken, or anywhere that Frank may have jotted down the combination the doors had been set to. He found nothing.

Henry really wanted to break something. He raised his hand to bang the table, but he put it back down, puffing out his cheeks instead. He didn't know what to do. Frank obviously hadn't known that Kansas was just out the back door, and now they had gone off someplace where they would find Henrietta—he hadn't been in the center cupboard—and all live happily ever after. Panicking in the dark, he had messed up everything. At least for him. Well, not just for him. Zeke would probably like to be back in Kansas, and he knew Aunt Dotty would. And whoever Ken Simmons was, he probably hadn't been hoping to spend the rest of his life wherever the center cupboard happened to lead.

That made Henry feel worse. If he hadn't goofed, he should have been able to catch up to everyone and tell them he'd found a way back to Kansas. Now, he was alone, and they were stuck.

Frank had said he should make for Kansas, or for a place called Hylfing. Henry opened the journals again
and looked over the cupboard names. Hylfing wasn't anywhere on there. He looked for the Deiran Coast, and for anything that could have been an abbreviation for the Deiran Coast. Nothing.

Henry knew that he had two choices and only two choices. Total. He could go to Boston—and he had already made that decision—or he could go through the cupboards, searching for his family, but more likely just for a place called Hylfing on the Deiran Coast. First, he'd be searching for a world that had a Deiran Coast.

He looked at the tuna juice. He really was getting thirsty.

Henry stood up and walked into the kitchen to get the glass he had left by the sink. When he had it, he walked back to the stairs and climbed slowly, thinking.

He had ninety-eight options. Remove Endor, the old throne room where the wizard Carnassus ate his grubs, and Byzanthamum, and he had ninety-five. But he only wanted to remove those places. He didn't know if they belonged to the same world as Hylfing. Grandfather's journal had said that there weren't that many completely different worlds. All three could be in the same one. But he didn't think that Byzanthamum and Endor belonged together. Darius had heard legends of Endor, but he'd been searching for a way through worlds.