Behind the Bookcase Page 7

  “Hurry, Jeb,” she whispered. “They’re coming. Run.”

  Jeb waved and took off as fast as he could, his feet kicking up black sand as he zigzagged through the trees. Sarah started to climb into the hole, but then noticed that Jeb had left his face behind. The glass box was on the sand near the trunk of a tree. She looked up. Jeb was so far away now that she would have to yell for him to hear her. But if she yelled, Lefty and the sentinel would hear her. She knew she couldn’t let Jeb lose his face forever, so without thinking about it another moment, she jumped down from the ledge.

  Billy was feeling especially pleased with himself. Not only did he have something that Sarah wanted—the key—but she had gotten in big trouble and he hadn’t. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be happy when people got in trouble, but Sarah didn’t count. She was so mean to him all the time, and Mom and Dad hardly ever noticed. She really deserved to get punished more than she did.

  Now he was in the basement with his parents, watching as Dad put the key in the big lock on the door. When it slid right in, Dad looked at Mom and smiled. “Wouldn’t that be something?” he said, and turned the key.

  But nothing happened. It just spun around and around. Dad took the key out.

  “Oh, well,” he said. “It was worth a try.”

  Mom nodded.

  “So now I can have it?” Billy asked.

  “If it’s okay with your mother,” Dad said.

  Mom nodded, took the key from Dad and faced Billy. “Want me to tie it on a string for you? Then you can wear it around your neck.”

  Billy nodded and they all started upstairs.

  “Why don’t you call a locksmith?” Mom suggested.

  “Bolt cutters will be a heck of a lot cheaper.”

  “Just seems a shame to cut that big old lock.”

  Dad shrugged as they went into the kitchen. “Where’s the phone book? I need to find a hardware store.”

  Billy perked up. He liked the hardware store. There were all kinds of neat things to look at. “Can I go with you?” he asked.

  “If Mom doesn’t need you here.”

  “That’s fine,” Mom said. “But I need a few things, too.” She found some string and tied the key to it. Then she put it around Billy’s neck. He couldn’t wait for Sarah to see it. Imagining her reaction made him smile.

  Dad came in from the front room with the phone book in his hand. “Do you have a list?”

  “Right here,” Mom said. She picked a slip of paper up from the counter and gave it to him.

  Dad glanced over it quickly. “All right.” He turned to Billy. “Just give me a few minutes to see if Grandma had any of this stuff in the garage and then we’ll go. Okay, partner?”

  Billy nodded and they went outside. Dad headed to the garage and hoisted the door while Billy walked to the hammock and jumped in. As he swung back and forth, he picked up the key and held it between his fingers, staring at it. It really was cool. So dark and old, with tiny little scratches that Mom had said was called “engraving” on it in a knotted design.

  “I wonder what it goes to?” Billy whispered to himself.

  And then he heard a voice say: “The door in the basement.”

  Billy blinked and looked around. Through the back window, he could see his mom in the kitchen, taking things down from the shelves. So he said, “Dad?”

  Dad poked his head around the side of the garage. “Yeah?”

  “Did you say something?”

  Dad shook his head.

  “Oh,” Billy said, and Dad went back into the garage.

  “Not your dad,” the voice whispered again. “Me.”

  Billy sat up and looked around again, but he couldn’t see anyone.

  “Down here,” the voice whispered, and Billy looked at the row of bushes behind the hammock. All he could see was Balthazat poking his head through.

  “Balthazat?” he said.

  “Shhh,” the cat said. “Please try to keep calm.”

  Billy gulped. “But you’re a cat.”

  “More than that,” said Balthazat. “I am the King of the Cats.”

  “But cats can’t talk.”

  “Obviously we can.”

  “Mom!” Billy yelled in his loudest “I just fell off my bike and I think I broke my arm” voice.

  “No, no, no,” Balthazat said. “You can’t let anyone else know that I can talk. Not even your sister. This has to be our secret.”

  Billy stared at Balthazat and suddenly smiled. He could think of nothing as sweet as having a secret from his sister—especially when that secret was a talking cat. Now he was sorry he had yelled like that.

  The back door opened and Mom came out. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?” she called to him.

  Billy looked at her. “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’? You sounded like you really hurt yourself or something.”

  Dad came out of the garage with a tape measure in his hand. “I’ll say.”

  “Tell her you thought you saw a big spider,” Balthazat whispered. “But everything’s okay now.”

  “I thought I saw a big spider,” Billy said. “But everything’s okay now.”

  “Oh,” Mom said, and went back inside. Dad went with her.

  Billy climbed out of the hammock and got to his knees.

  “Well,” Balthazat said, “that was easy, wasn’t it?”

  Billy nodded. “So where did you come from?”

  “A place called Penumbra,” Balthazat said.

  Billy’s eyes went wide. “So it’s real? The place behind the door in the basement?”

  “Of course it’s real. And it’s supposed to be a secret. But the thing is, I need to get back there right away and I need your help.”

  “Really? Nobody ever needs my help.”

  “I guess you can’t say that anymore.”

  Billy sucked in a breath. “I guess not,” he said. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you to use that key to open the door in the basement.”

  “We tried it already. It didn’t work.”

  “That’s because you weren’t doing it correctly,” Balthazat said.

  Billy frowned. “Really? How are we supposed to do it?”

  “Come upstairs with me and I’ll show you.”

  “But I told my dad I’d go to the hardware store with him.”

  “You’d rather do that than hang out with the King of the Cats?”

  Billy shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “Tell him you’ve changed your mind.”

  Billy nodded just as the back door opened and Dad came out. “You ready to go?” he called across the yard.

  Billy looked at Dad, then at Balthazat, then back at his dad again. “No,” he said. “I changed my mind.”

  “You sure?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Suit yourself.”

  Billy waited until Dad was in the van and backing out of the driveway before he turned to Balthazat and said, “What now?”

  Sarah hit the sand hard and rolled. Snatching up the glass box, she took off through the trees in the direction Jeb had run. She heard the sentinel and Lefty at her back, but when she looked over her shoulder, they were heading away from her. She turned around again and ran faster and faster until she was so out of breath that she collapsed to the ground and flopped onto her back.

  Jeb peeked out from behind a tree. When he saw Sarah, he stepped out. “What are you doing?” he said. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, and sat up. “But you forgot this.” She showed him the glass case.

  “Oh,” he said, coming forward. He knelt next to her and took the case from her hands. “I don’t know what to say. If they had found it, I would have never gotten it back.” Jeb looked at her. “But what’ll we do now? How will you get back?”

  “We’ll wait until they leave and you can boost me up again.”

  “What if t
hey don’t leave?”

  “Oh,” Sarah said. She hadn’t considered that possibility. “Do you think we can find another way through?”

  “Are you kidding? Balthazat and the sentinels never have.”

  “What about the one you came through? Couldn’t we find that one?”

  Jeb shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “We have to try,” Sarah said. “Come on.”

  They walked for a long time without talking, up and down hills of black sand in front of endless sections of black mountains. The farther they walked, the thinner Sarah’s hope became. Every shadow tree they passed seemed to hover overhead like another bad thing about to happen. Sarah began to worry that maybe Balthazat did know about the journal and that he would trick Billy the way he had tricked her. She worried that Billy would open the door to Penumbra for him. That Balthazat would steal the sleepers and bring them back to Scotopia. That Jeb would never get his face put back together. She soon realized that thinking about all those bad things was only making her feel worse, so she decided to focus instead on what she could do to stop them. “Does any of this look familiar?” she asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wasn’t, really. But I’m beginning to understand how you couldn’t find your way back to where you came through.” The landscape was so similar to everything else she had seen so far that it seemed they had merely been walking in place. “Is all of Scotopia like this?”

  “No. I’ve heard Balthazat talk about different places. He’s had meetings, too, with the things in charge of those places.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One time, this disgusting thing named Hashmed came from a place called the Green Desert to report on a rebellion of the blemmyes. They wanted to get rid of Balthazat and take over Scotopia and try to make things better for everyone. But Balthazat stopped them before they even got started.” Jeb shook his head.

  Sarah looked around again. “It seems so obvious to me now that this is a bad place, full of bad things. I wonder how come I didn’t see that when I first got here.”

  Jeb smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I used to spend a lot of time asking myself that same question. But then I realized that I couldn’t blame myself for not seeing the truth. And neither should you. We only did what any normal person would do. We believed the best about where we were and about those we met. Tell you the truth, I’d rather be that way and live with the mistakes than always think the worst of everything and everyone.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Me too.”

  They walked in silence again for another stretch. When they came to a giant river, Sarah sat down on a black rock poking through the sand and put her chin in her hands. “Okay,” she said. “I give up.”

  “You don’t really mean that,” Jeb said. “Do you?”

  “We’ll never find another way through. This place is huge, and it all looks the same. I doubt we’ll even be able to find our way back to the one I came through. Besides, even if we could, it’s probably too late. Balthazat may have figured out how to open the door to Penumbra by now.”

  “But we don’t know that for sure,” Jeb said, and knelt in front of Sarah. “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about giving up? How many times I decided that I would just quit trying? Trying to open this box. Trying to figure out a way back. Trying to stop Balthazat from his search. But every time I decided I would give up, I felt something give me a poke and remind me that there was still a chance. As long as we keep trying, there’s always a chance. When I saw you come through the door of Balthazat’s cabin, I knew that I had been right to not give up. So you can’t give up. Because if you do, then all my hope will have been for nothing.”

  Sarah looked at him. She didn’t feel so sad and tired anymore. “So what do we do if we can’t find a way through?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Jeb said. “Do you remember what I told you about the blemmyes?”

  “From the Green Desert? The ones who wanted to start the rebellion?”

  Jeb nodded and got to his feet. “I was thinking that if we could find them, maybe we could convince them to try again. We could tell them that Balthazat isn’t here, so they have a real chance this time.”

  “That’s a great idea!”

  Jeb nodded. “We could get them to chase off Lefty and the sentinels, for one thing. And if you go back and find out Balthazat has already started his plan, then I’ll be here waiting with the blemmyes to stop him from finishing it.”

  Sarah slapped her knees and stood up. “So do you have any idea how we get to the Green Desert?”

  “Sure,” Jeb said. “All we have to do is …” He stopped talking, but his mouth stayed open and then his eye went blank. It seemed to Sarah that he wasn’t looking at her anymore, but behind her.

  “Jeb?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  He lifted his finger and pointed. “About him.”

  Sarah slowly turned around. For a long moment, she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. The ground itself seemed to be lifting up in front of her, like a wave. Only it wasn’t sand, it was darkness, thick and black. She saw dozens of hands stretching out from the edges of the black and then she saw eyes, hundreds of them, blacker even than the darkness that surrounded them. She felt something at her feet, and when she looked down, she realized she and Jeb were standing on whatever this thing was and it was now lifting the part they stood on, tipping them backward. She slammed into Jeb and he slipped back.

  “What is it?” she shouted.

  “His name is Mr. Ink,” Jeb said. “He works for Balthazat, too.”

  “Of course he does,” Sarah shouted. Then, for a brief moment, she thought they might escape if they could just get off of Mr. Ink, but the other side, unseen until now, lifted up behind them and they fell, rolling together like balls in a sheet as the top closed overhead. The darkness inside was cold and complete.

  “Jeb?” Sarah said. But he didn’t answer. She reached out, patting her way through the black until she found him. She felt his arms and shoulders and face. “Jeb?” she said again, but it was clear that he had passed out.

  Suddenly, she heard flapping sounds, like the wings of a hundred birds at once, and she knew they were flying somehow. Reflexively, she reached out to grab something to steady herself, but only succeeded in slipping farther down, in a different direction. She patted her hands along the smooth dark surface that surrounded her but didn’t like the cold leathery feel of it. She had hoped to find an opening that she could look through, but now she would just have to wait and see where they went.

  It wasn’t long before Jeb came to, and Sarah explained to him what had happened. “And,” she concluded, “I have no idea where we’re going.”

  “I do,” Jeb said. “That’s what worries me.”

  “Where?” Sarah asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jeb was silent for a long time before he finally said, “The Black Iron Prison.”

  At that very moment, the flying darkness that had them in its grip began its descent. The drop was so fast that Sarah yelped as her tummy fluttered. “The what?” she asked, trying to catch her breath.

  “The Black Iron Prison,” Jeb repeated. “It’s where Balthazat puts anyone who doesn’t agree with him.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “Nothing. He just never lets them out.”

  “Oh,” Sarah said, and her stomach fluttered again as their descent grew even more rapid. She wanted to ask him how Mr. Ink had found them, but then she realized it really didn’t matter. And then they landed so suddenly that they both fell over.

  Almost immediately, a seam of light opened overhead and the darkness peeled away. They had landed on a platform made of dark metal. Sarah wondered if it was iron and hoped it wasn’t. She looked at Jeb, but he was staring straight ahead, at a row of six squat creatur
es standing in front of the platform, each holding a flickering torch of blue fire.

  “Mr. Ink,” one of the squat creatures said as it stepped onto the platform. “Back from patrol, are you? And what have you brought for us this time?” The creature was close enough now that Sarah could see it had only one eye in the center of its forehead. She was starting to get to her feet, when a cold hand grabbed her upper arm, pulled her roughly to one side, and shoved her onto the platform. A moment later, Jeb crashed down next to her. When she looked over her shoulder, she saw the darkness shrinking into itself, taking the form of a tall man in a top hat and cape. He remained completely black, however, like a silhouette, or a pool of the stuff he was apparently named after.

  “I found these two in the Forest of Shadows,” Mr. Ink said. His voice sounded like wind from a cave. Sarah could feel it blowing across the back of her neck, lifting goose bumps. “They were on their way to the Green Desert to see the blemmyes.”

  Sarah felt her hope dwindle, like a candle flame sputtering. She hoped that Mr. Ink hadn’t heard their whole plan.

  “Is that a fact?” the cyclops said, pacing back and forth in front of Sarah and Jeb. “What for?”

  “They said something about getting the blemmyes to start the rebellion again. Said something about Balthazat not being here.”

  The already dim hope inside Sarah went out completely.

  The cyclops stepped closer and bent forward to get a closer look. “But isn’t this Balthazat’s houseboy?” he said as he lowered the torch toward Jeb’s face. “Well?” the cyclops asked. “Aren’t you?”

  Jeb looked at him for a long moment, and Sarah saw something in his face that she had not seen before. It was anger, pure and simple. The intensity of it frightened her, and she got scared that he might do something that would make their situation worse. Before she could say anything, Jeb spit in the guard’s eye. The cyclops reeled back and stood up straight. He held still for a long moment, then used the back of his arm to wipe his eye, slowly. He stepped toward Jeb, lowering the torch and pushing the burning end into Jeb’s shoulder. Jeb screamed and jumped back. The cyclops moved forward to do it again, but Sarah, overcome with anger herself, grabbed the torch without thinking.