The Keepers (10 page)

At home, he made his excuses and went to his room. He put the box on the desk, leaving it in its pouch and laying a workbook over it. He couldn't bear to look at it right now. He examined the stars on his ceiling, remembering the rough night he'd had, and decided then and there to redo them all. He'd take them down, put up new constellations—peaceful ones like Lyra the harp and Circinus the compass. That would take his mind off of everything else for a while.

He got out a bin full of glow-in-the-dark stars and one of his astronomy books. He sat on the floor with scissors and got to work trimming the stars down so they were round, the way stars truly were, making different sizes for the different stars he'd need. Soon he was deeply engrossed. Loki came in to watch, as usual, keeping a respectful but curious distance. And then, just as he was peering at the star chart for Eridanus the river, he caught sight of a glinting movement, a falling shimmer. He flinched as something dropped heavily into the bin of stickers. A shower of stars exploded upward.

Loki leapt to his feet, bristling and wide-eyed. Horace sat frozen, scissors in one hand and stars scattered across his lap, the floor. “Was that you?” he asked Loki, but the cat was an arm's length away.

Horace reached cautiously into the bin. Beneath the white and yellow stars, he spied the glint of something shiny and silver. Horace plucked the silver thing from the pile.

It was the house key.

The key his father had put into the box yesterday evening.

The key that had vanished from the box.

Horace looked stupidly into the air. Where had it come from?

He stood, brushing stars from his lap. He spun in a circle, still holding the key, looking everywhere, but there was nothing to see. They key had come back to him, but he had no idea how, or why.

“Lost?” said a voice at the door. His mother.

Horace closed his fist around the key. “No, I . . . ,” he said slowly. “No, not lost.”
Found
, he thought to himself.
But how?

“Listen, I know it's chess night, but Dad and I thought we could all do dinner and a movie. The three of us. And maybe some ice cream afterward?”

“Um, yeah. Sure.”

“Great. It's a little after six—”

“Six oh four,” Horace said absently, slipping the key into his pants pocket.

“Right. We'll need to leave in forty-five minutes if we want to catch dinner before the movie at nine. And then we'll do chess tomorrow, okay?”

“Chess movie, right,” Horace said. He pushed little questing thoughts at the box on his desk, but nothing came back at him—no feeling. Nothing. The box was quiet.

Horace, of course, did not want to go to the movie. He wanted to stay home. The key had returned, and more than anything he wanted—needed—to perform more experiments with the box. But of course he could say none of this.

Forty-five minutes later, as he and his parents headed out the front door, Loki escaped. He shot out like a shadow, squeezing through Horace's awkward attempt to pin him against the doorjamb with his foot.

“Danger time,” his mother said mildly, watching him go.

“What I don't understand,” Horace's father said, “is where he goes, and how he finds his way back.”

Hearing these words, Horace could almost feel the key in his pocket, heavy and foreign and mysterious. “Tell me about it,” he said.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT
, Horace sat in the backseat of the car. They were headed home at last after an enormous deep-dish pizza, a movie that was almost one hundred percent boring—almost—and ice cream cones that no one needed. With his left hand, he held tight to the box in its pouch. With his right, he fiddled with the cold, sharp shape of the house key.

All evening, the reappearance of the key had been consuming his thoughts. At first he'd theorized that the key had been sent back to him by someone—or something—on the other end of the box. But logically, that didn't make much sense. Why would the key come back alone? Why hadn't anything else been sent through—the eraser or the archer or a response to his note? Plus, if true, this theory meant that there had to be
two
boxes, didn't it? His, and a second one to send the stuff back. But Horace knew somewhere deep in his heart and his flesh and his bones that there was only one glass-bottom box. No, he was missing something simple. Something just a step away—but a strange step away, a step sideways and back, or a step into the air, or a step into another pair of shoes entirely.

And then they went to the movie. During the movie, there was a scene in which a boy buried a toy truck in his backyard, and then, decades later, this same boy—now an old
man—dug it up. It had been lying there undisturbed for years and was now reemerging into that distant future. Horace had barely been watching, but when the old man pulled the truck from the dirt, Horace went as still as wood, staring. Something shifted and settled in his head, and the whole pile of thought he'd been juggling all night collapsed into something simple and clear. “Oh!” he cried out, sitting up straight. His father shushed him.

Now, headed home, Horace felt crystalline and sure, the way he felt when a long, tense stretch of examining the chessboard ended in a moment of clarity and the perfect move. The box was a warm glow at his side, steady and comforting. He tried to give a name to what was coming from it. Not disappointment, not anymore. Instead, power. Presence. Reassurance. When they got home, he said good night to his parents and headed for his room. It was nearly midnight. He turned on his light, eyes already trained on the carpet beside his bed.

Four shapes, still and sharp and clear.

An eraser. Two marbles. An elven archer.

Kneeling, Horace took them into his hands. He'd been convinced that the box was a teleportation device of some kind, that it had been sending the objects somewhere else, but that was all wrong. It wasn't a teleporter.

It was a time machine.

Horace's face broke into a smile so wide it hurt. The box sent things not to a different place, but to a different
time—one day into the future, to be exact. It all fit: the key going into the box a little after six o'clock on Thursday, and then falling into the bin of glow-in-the-dark stars twenty-four hours later. It had reappeared exactly where he and his father had been standing the day before, when his father put the key in the box. The marbles and the eraser and the archer had disappeared through the box last night at precisely 11:11, and now here they were, exactly where their journey had begun, having moved not through space, but through
time
. One day into the future. And suddenly Horace understood: the silver emblem on the front of the box wasn't merely a star; it was the sun. Twelve long rays and twelve short, twenty-four total for the hours in a day. Everything made sense. Horace swung toward his desk. It was 11:58, and if all this was true, that meant that any second now, the note—

A quick knock, and then Horace's door cracked open. His father peered in. “You're still awake.”

“I'm sleep!” Horace said shrilly. “Sleepy, I mean. Very.”

His father cocked his head quizzically, and in the same instant at Horace's desk there came a soft
pop
, very faint, like a plop of ketchup hitting the floor. Horace stared as last night's note, sent just before midnight, materialized out of thin air and tumbled onto the desk. He sucked in a great breath of wonder and alarm, then tried to pretend he was only yawning.
I was right!
he thought.

His father leaned in farther. He hadn't seen the note reappear, but the tightly folded paper was coming undone now,
opening slightly. His father spotted it and came inside, picking it up. “‘Not garbage,'” he recited. “‘Please read.' Sounds important.”

“It's just a school thing.” Thinking quickly, Horace invented a story about Mr. Ludwig's class, a new project having to do with the SETI program, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

His father opened the note and read it over. “Looking for aliens,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Going to pass them a note. Invite them to dinner, maybe.”

“Well,” Horace told him, feeling flustered, “there's a whole thing involved.” It was now precisely midnight. At this time last night, he had just been about to send the blue pencil sharpener through the box. Things were about to get . . . interesting. His father had to go, of course, but instead he just stood there and made a couple more jokes about the note. Horace laughed dimly, trying to sound as sleepy as possible.

At last his father said good night and left. No sooner had he closed the door than there was another
pop
. The pencil sharpener materialized and clattered onto the desk, dropping out of nowhere. Horace let out a giddy sound of relief and ran over, snatching it up.

Horace ran his hand through his hair, tugging at it. “That was close,” he whispered. Another soft
pop
, and a golden plastic coin fell, glinting faintly. Horace lunged, almost grabbing
it out of the air. “You're here. You're back.” He tried not to laugh as objects continued to materialize out of thin air, a new delivery every several seconds. They appeared as if by magic, with just that barely audible pop. No flash of light, no nothing.
Pop . . . pop . . . pop
. Item after item. And through it all, he marveled to think that—in a way—he'd been holding these very same objects in his hand just moments ago. He wondered if they might still be slightly warm from yesterday's touch.

The Super Ball was last. He caught it on a hop.

Horace breathed. Now that it was over, the room felt rudely silent and small. Flat. With the channel to the past closed, it was as if the world had lost a dimension—which in a way, it had. He wrestled with what had just happened. He owned a time machine—a small one, sure, but still. Time travel was the stuff of stories, of science fiction. And in most of those stories, it turned out to be dangerous. Messing around with time could theoretically lead to all sorts of trouble. Lives changed. Histories reversed. Paradoxes. But right at this moment, to be honest, Horace hardly cared. What was happening right now was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him, danger or no danger.

Horace's brain was now in high gear. Even now, knowing what the box was capable of, he felt like he'd wandered into a huge room full of everything he
didn't
know. He was only twelve, after all, but he had access to a power that shouldn't even exist. And for what purpose? What was he to
do? He needed instructions. He needed peace of mind. He needed . . . answers.

At once he thought of Mr. Meister. But no sooner had the thought materialized than he shoved it away. Mr. Meister had wanted him to discover what the box did on his own, and Horace had done that. Maybe the old man would open up now, tell him the rest, but somehow Horace didn't feel ready. He himself wasn't yet satisfied with what he knew. The box was a time machine, yes, but how was that even possible? How could such a machine work? No, if Horace was going to go back to the House of Answers, he was going to go back there with some answers of his own.

He turned on his computer. He set the box down beside the keyboard. He got online, clicked on the search bar, and slowly typed:

is time travel possible?

He glanced at the box. “It's a rhetorical question, I know, because obviously it's possible. But I have to start somewhere.”

He hit enter. His screen filled with hits. He leaned forward and began to read.

“T
IME TRAVEL
?” M
R
. L
UDWIG SAID, HIS VOICE SQUEAKING
scratchily as he raised it in mock disbelief. “Are you looking to take a trip into the past? Right some wrongs? Maybe take another crack at that quiz you bombed last week?”

Horace shook his head. He barely even remembered taking that quiz. “Future, actually,” he said, and was surprised by how serious his voice sounded, how low and loud as it echoed through the empty lab. It was Monday after school. Horace had waited until all the other students had already gone before approaching his teacher's desk.

“Then you're in luck,” said Mr. Ludwig. “The future is probably easier than the past.”

“That's what I read,” said Horace. “The past is already set, but the future is still full of possibilities. Plus, if it's possible to travel into the past, why haven't we seen any visitors from the future?”

“You've already done some research on this, I see.”

Over the weekend, Horace had done a lot of searching and reading. And then there was the box itself—in a way, he'd already done some research that Mr. Ludwig would hardly be able to imagine. “Research, yeah. But I still have some questions.”

“I'll see if I can help. Tell me what you know.”

“Okay,” Horace said. “From what I understand, it seems like time travel might sort of be possible, and that speed might be the key.”