Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (17 page)

The neolithic tomb was, at least, pleasantly spooky. It was a large round mound, with a dark entrance down a narrow set of stone steps. At the bottom, the opening widened into a circular room, from which three stone passages radiated. Stuart stood in the center and slowly shone his flashlight beam around the space. He had the oddest feeling that he’d seen it before—but it had been smaller, and he’d seen it from
above
.

He shut his eyes for a moment, and remembered that night in the museum, when he had nearly walked smack into the model of wartime Beeton. His light beam had flashed across the miniature town, and for the briefest of moments he had seen a trio of tunnels—air-raid shelters—converging on a wide central area, just like the one that he was now standing in. That central area had been just beneath a delicate little raised structure with a pointed roof. At the time, he hadn’t recognized it, but now he suddenly knew what it was: the bandstand. The bandstand in the park! It had never occurred to him that there might be something
underneath
it. And if there was, then there had to be an entrance that he’d missed.

He thought of the last photograph in the book. Uncle Tony had been sitting on the grass next to a poster that read
SUNDAY CONCERTS
.

A poster on a bulletin board.

A bulletin board screwed to the base of the bandstand.

“It’s
behind
it!” he shouted. And from the stone walls, his voice boomed back at him:
behind, behind, behind
.

His father looked up from the leaflet he was reading and said, “Did you know that the word
echo
comes from the Greek legend about a nymph?”

“Nope,” said Stuart, and he had a mad urge to run all the way back to Beeton to share the news with April. But there was still another whole day of the vacation to go, and the time seemed to pass with unbearable slowness.

Sunday afternoon was spent slogging up a steep and winding hill, to look at the view (fields, mainly), and in the evening the camping stove kept blowing out, so they ate cold soup and rolls and listened to a radio play about Irish potato farmers.

Monday morning came at last. They caught an early bus to the train station, bought five newspapers so that Stuart’s father could check out the crosswords, and stood waiting for the 8:55 to Beeton. It was late.

“Here’s one to pass the time,” said his father. “
Raise fig to model present
. Four letters.”

“Don’t know,” said Stuart.

“Gift,” declared Mr. Horten. “It’s
fig
backward, you see, and then T, as in Model T Ford.”

“You’re looking at your watch a lot, Stuart,” said his mother. “Is there something you need to get back for?”

“I just want to see April.”

“One of the girls next door?”

He nodded.

“Oh, but it’s
so lovely
that you’ve made such a good friend already,” said his mother, and she gave him an embarrassingly public hug.

“Try this one,” his father offered, rustling
The Times. “Breadmaker’s quantity unlucky for the trisketaphobic
. Eight letters.”

“Don’t know,” said Stuart.

“It’s rather straightforward. Trisketaphobia is a fear of the number thirteen, and ‘
breadmaker’s quantity’
refers to the phrase ‘a baker’s dozen,’ which, of course, also means thirteen.”

“Here’s the train,” said his mother.

But Stuart had stopped looking along the track and was staring, horrified, up at his father. “Thirteen?” he repeated. “A baker’s dozen means thirteen?”

His father nodded enthusiastically. “The phrase is believed to originate from the medieval practice of adding an extra loaf to the …”

But Stuart had stopped listening. Instead, he was thinking of the bingo hall and of the old ladies who’d talked to him in the foyer. “
Baker’s dozen
,” Vi had said of the number of toffees in every bag. “
Unluckily for my teeth
,” Lorna had added, but Stuart had missed that extra clue and had just assumed that the baker’s bit was the name of a sort of toffee. All he had remembered was the word
dozen
. He’d told April that the first number of the safe combination must be twelve, but he’d been wrong. Horribly, ignorantly, wrong.

CHAPTER 26

He sat on the train, rigid with disbelief. How long would April have spent trying, hopelessly, to open the safe?
She
would have known what a baker’s dozen was …

A thin drizzle began to streak the windows.

“Nearly there,” said his mother, as the rain grew heavier.

It was torrential by the time they arrived in Beeton. The taxi from the train station felt more like a boat, swishing through the puddles.

“Who’s that?” asked his mother, pressing her face to the window as they drew into Beech Road. The rain was like a flapping gray curtain, and through it Stuart could just see a small figure leaning out of a window of the triplets’ house, binoculars to eyes. A second later, the figure disappeared.

The taxi stopped and Stuart opened the door. As he did so, the front door of the triplets’ house flew open and April shot out and ran over, shouting something frantically.

“What?” asked Stuart.

“Now!” screeched April, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him from the car. “You have to go right now!
Right now!!!!
”

“Go where?” Stuart was bewildered. He’d only been out of the car for five seconds and he was already soaked. The rain was streaming down April’s glasses and dripping off the bottom of the frames.

“Your great-uncle Tony’s house,” said April.

“You mean it’s still there?” He’d assumed it would be just a pile of rubble by now.

“It might be still there,” said April. “It might just possibly. April promised to try and stop it, but I don’t know whether she’s managed.”

“What?” asked Stuart, feeling and sounding stupid.

“April promised to try and stop it,” said April, loudly and clearly.

“But you’re April,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

She shook her head. “I’m May. I’m wearing April’s glasses. She didn’t want to be followed, so she went disguised.”

“Disguised as who?”

“As
me
, you idiot.”

Stuart shook his head. He felt as if the rain had leaked into his ears.

“Just
listen
,” said May, leaning close and shoving a pink plastic purse into his hand. “She told me to tell you that she tried to do whatever it was that you wanted her to do, but she couldn’t. The numbers wouldn’t work, so she’s gone to try and stop the demolition; she said to give you this purse. She found the card underneath a cow, she said. And she told me to look for you, and to send you over
as soon as
you got here. Not after half an hour of you saying, ‘What?’ to everything I tell you.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Stuart thinking, yet again, what an infuriating trio they were. “But I’ll be followed, too,” he added.

May shook her head. “June put on April’s spare glasses and went off to the swimming pool two hours ago. They’ll be following her.”

“Right. I’ll get going then.” He felt a bit stunned by the complexity of the plan. “So how much did April tell you about Great-Uncle Tony and the house and everything?” he asked as he turned to leave.

May shook her head, raindrops spraying from her glasses. “Nothing,” she said. “She never tells us anything. She’s the quiet one of the family.”

Stuart’s parents had been watching him from the open door of the house, and now he ran up to them and gabbled, “Gotta go right away gotta see one of the triplets I’ll be careful won’t talk to any strangers be careful crossing the road I’ll be back for tea.” Then he ran off, returning briefly to grab the raincoat that his mother was waving at him.

His feet sent up great sprays of water from the wet sidewalk, and he swerved past pedestrians and skidded around corners, reaching the corner of Great-Uncle Tony’s street in only five minutes. He stopped dead. Because there, in front of the house, parked over the smashed remains of the fence and gate, was a huge yellow machine. It had tank tracks, a cab with a high seat, and a vast hydraulic arm. At the end of the arm was a colossal pair of toothed metal jaws that had already taken four or five savage bites out of the roof and gutters of the house. The attic beams were visible, the broken ends as pale as straw, and the yard was filled with shattered shingles. But the jaws were no longer moving, and the cab was empty. A cluster of workmen, all wearing hard hats, were staring up at the hydraulic arm, and staring back down at them from the very top of it, was April.

She was sitting, legs dangling, arms folded, a good twenty feet above the ground. As Stuart watched, one of the workmen threw down his hat in frustration and started to climb up the side of the cab.

Instantly, April scrambled to her feet, closed her eyes, and stood on one leg. All the workmen shouted “
No!
” and the one who’d been climbing up the cab leaped back off. April opened her eyes, lowered her foot, and carefully sat back down again.

Stuart had been standing as if nailed to the ground, but now he managed to unstick himself and began to creep forward. The men had their backs to him. He raised his hand and gave a tiny, subtle wave to April. She ignored him. He gave a larger wave, but she still took no notice and then he realized that without her glasses, he was probably nothing more than a blur. He waved both hands, and then both arms, and then he jumped up and down, thankful that the rain would blot out any noise.

At last April seemed to spot him. She squinted in his direction and then deliberately looked away, and scratched her head. But the hand that was doing the scratching had one finger sticking out, and it pointed in the direction of the house.

“April!” shouted the oldest of the group of men. “If you don’t come down right now, you will spend your birthday locked in the spare room, while your sisters have a huge party. And their present will be a trip to Disneyland. Without you.”

“Don’t care, Dad,” said April. She began to whistle tunelessly.

Stuart tiptoed across the broken fence, passed behind the group of men, and ran down the alleyway along the side of the house. The back door was open. Stuart walked cautiously in through the kitchen and along the corridor. The long room was now empty of furniture, and the walls were patterned with sliding rain shadows. In the rippling gray light, he opened the little purse that May had given him and took out a folded note and a dusty piece of card the size of a bus ticket. On one side (the side he’d seen before) it said:

WEAKLING!

And on the other:

YOU’LL NEED TO DOUBLE YOUR EFFORTS
TO GET THE RIGHT RESULT!

Hurriedly, Stuart unfolded the note. It was written in a horrible, hasty scrawl.

Museum was closed Sat, being dusted for vandal’s fingerprints, so I went to Unc Tony’s house anyway and tried 12, 10 and every possible last number—didn’t work. Went back to museum first thing this morning, found this card. It’s obviously an instruction, not a number. I haven’t had time to try it. Sorry to let you down. Will try and delay the demolition …

Faintly, from the front yard Stuart could hear April’s father threatening to phone the fire department. There was no more time for fooling around. He had to get the combination right the first time. He closed his eyes and thought.

Thirteen toffees.

Top Marks Tire Repair Kit. (Ten out of ten.)

An instruction to double his efforts.

He opened his eyes again, lifted the picture from the wall, and grasped the little dial.

He turned it clockwise to 26, counterclockwise to 20, and clockwise all the way around to 20 again. There was a sharp
click
, and the door jerked in his grasp. He pulled, and it swung open.

For a moment he thought it was empty, and then Stuart put in his hand and felt around, patting the darkness. There, in one corner, his fingers touched a small, flat object. A key. A key far too small for any door. A
padlock
key.