Horten's Incredible Illusions (16 page)
And she saw something.
On the wall right next to her, directly underneath the lowest shelf, invisible to someone standing up, were five lines of writing.
CROWN CROWNING THE COLUMN
ORB ORBITING
RING AROUND THE RODENT ROUTE
SCEPTER IN THE CENTRAL SLIDER
CLOAK CLOSE TO THE CLARET
Clues. Clues that she would have seen if only, at the start, she had sat down for just
one
minute. April’s groan of despair sent the small dog leaping off her lap, and she buried her face in her hands. CROWN CROWNING THE COLUMN presumably meant that the correct one was at the top of the huge pillar of crowns on the table. And CLOAK CLOSE TO THE CLARET must have been the cloak she’d found on the floor near the tipped-over goblet, since
claret
meant red wine.
But now it was too late—all the rings and crowns and cloaks and scepters were completely mixed up and she had no idea which one was which. She would just have to work her way through every possible combination with as much speed as possible.
“Stuart, I am so sorry,” she muttered, standing up. She stepped over the dog, which was licking something on the floor beneath the table, and then she paused, and peered down.
The thing he was licking on the floor was a dried wine stain.
It only took her a few seconds to gallop back into the throne room and start examining the cloaks, and she jumped into the air in triumph when she found a small stain on the second cloak. She tossed it onto the throne, and sprinted back to the treasure room, where she sat back down on the stool, focused on the clues, and thought deeply.
Orb orbiting.
Orbiting
meant going around something. Like a satellite orbiting the earth. Or the earth orbiting the—
“Sun!” she shouted.
There, in the center of the treasure room, was the golden candleholder shaped like the sun, and she’d found all sorts of treasure on it, including one of the orbs, balanced on a bracelet. She went over to the candleholder and noticed that odd drips of wax were scattered across the other objects on it, and then she made another dash to the throne room. It only took half a minute to find the orb whose ruby sides were similarly spotted with wax.
Ring around the rodent route.
Rodent = mouse
, she thought.
So where had she seen the mouse go? She remembered that it had zipped across the room toward the tall gilded cabinet in one corner, and when she went over there and crouched down, she could see a tiny gap between the cabinet and the wall and a trail of mouse poop that indicated its usual route. But—and she felt almost certain about this—she hadn’t found any of the nine diamond rings in this particular corner. She swept the patch of floor clean with one foot, then lay down full length and put her eye to the crack. And there, looking right back at her through what seemed to be a tiny circular picture frame, was a mouse, its eyes like drops of ink. It whisked away in an instant, and April was left looking at the miniature frame. And she realized what it was: a diamond ring, wedged sideways between the wall and cabinet.
As she heaved the cabinet away from the wall, she was shaking; if she hadn’t read the clues, she’d
never
have found the right ring. It tinkled to the floor, and she hooked it over one finger and carried on the search.
Scepter in the central slider.
What slides in this room?
she asked herself, and the answer was easy: a drawer. The cabinet that she’d just wrenched from the wall had five drawers—she’d searched it earlier and found at least two scepters in there. She opened the middle drawer now and looked at the tumbled treasure inside. There was nothing to mark the contents—no wine stains, no wax—but as she stood looking, she saw a microscopic movement. A spider the size of a grape seed was dangling on a near-invisible thread between a ruby coronet and an opal bracelet, and April remembered something. When she’d taken one of the scepters out of the cabinet, it had felt
sticky
, and she had brushed some gray thread off her fingers.
This time, as she careered from treasure room to throne room, the little dog ran at her heels, as if joining in a game. It watched as she picked through the scepters, and its tail appeared to wag when she found one with a swathe of cobweb still wrapped around one end.
“And now just the crown,” said April, an idea already forming. “Do you like cheese?” she asked the dog.
She went and found the slab of bread and cheese that had been resting on top of the stack of crowns, broke off a crumb or two and offered them to the dog. It vacuumed them up. Then she arranged the crowns in a long row, picked up the dog, and carried it along the row, nose downward, just a few inches from the crowns.
The dog sniffed violently at the fourth one, and when she repeated the exercise, going from the other end this time, the same thing happened again. Triumphantly she stuck the crown on her head, and hurriedly dressed herself in the enormous cloak. Then she put the dog under one arm, picked up the scepter and the orb, and staggered over to the throne, feeling as if she were running a marathon. And she was just inches away from completing it when she tripped over the hem of the cloak, lurched sideways, and dropped both dog and orb.
She flailed in the air, missed the dog, caught the orb, and landed on the throne on one hip, glimpsing her pink, horrified face in the oval mirror. Over it, a scarlet letter
T
suddenly appeared, and then the world gave a sudden shiver and she found herself back—
where?
In total darkness. In stifling heat.
April reached out a hand and felt a wall that was somehow soft and warm—a heavy cloth, she realized, draped right over the Reappearing Rose Bower, and she grabbed a fold of it and pulled. It slid away, letting in cooler air, and she saw that she was in a shed of some kind, with chinks of late-afternoon light shining through the plank walls and odd shapes looming in the shadows nearby.
“
Hey!
” shouted a desperate, cracked voice from directly beneath her. “Is that you, April? Are you back?”
“Stuart!”
She jumped off the seat, grabbed the magic star, and waited anxiously for Stuart to reappear. The lever clacked and ratcheted three times, and the twining silver stems relaxed, revealing a small, slumped figure on the throne.
“I’ve been stuck here for
ages
,” said Stuart huskily.
“I know. And I’m so, so sorry. Do you know where we are? Has the trick been stolen, or is this a museum store … or what?” She was searching the shed as she spoke, and her fingers found and rattled at a locked door. “We can’t get out!” she added, trying not to panic.
“I don’t know anything,” said Stuart. “I’ve been under that throne, and I couldn’t really hear what was going on. I know we went on a truck, and there was lots of moving around and crashing and banging, and then …” Stuart’s mouth was so dry that his words turned into a series of coughs. “… and then it went totally quiet,” he continued, catching his breath, “and it’s been quiet for a really long time.”
“But why didn’t you use the lever to get out of there for a while?” asked April. “Just for a quick look around or to get some fresh air? I would have done that.”
“Because I didn’t know what would happen if you came back and I wasn’t in the right place.”
It had been so horrible and hot and claustrophobic, and Stuart’s head had begun pounding so badly that a couple of times he’d nearly pulled the lever—his fingers had curled around it—but each time he’d had a dreadful vision of April completing her puzzle at exactly the same moment, and getting horribly squashed in the insides of the mechanism.
“I didn’t dare, just in case something went wrong.”
“Oh,” said April. “Thank you.”
There was a pause. Stuart couldn’t see her expression, but he could hear her taking odd, irregular breaths.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
When she spoke, it was in a very small, un-Aprillike voice. “You’re braver than I am,” she said. “I couldn’t have put up with that. I wasn’t even brave enough to go on the adventure on my own. I took the dog with me.”
Stuart’s stomach seemed to do a flip. “You took Charlie? Where is he?”
“That’s the dog’s name? Well, he’s still there,” said April. “I tripped over something and dropped him just as I was coming back. I’m so, so sorry.”
In the terrible silence that followed, there was the sudden sound of a key turning. Stuart jumped up, and April stood tensely beside him.
The door opened.
Two identical heads were silhouetted in the low summer light.
“I told you so!” shrieked one of them. “I
told
you they hadn’t left that exhibition room.”
“May!” shouted April. “And June! How did you find us?”
“How did you get in there?”
“How do we get out?”
“Where were you?”
“Where are we now?”
A million triplet questions seemed to fill the air, all of them unanswered, all of them incredibly loud. Stuart’s head began to hurt a lot, and he sat down again. The questions changed tack.
“What’s wrong with Stuart?”
“Why’s he so blotchy?”
“What’s he been doing?”
“Are you all right, Stuart?”
“Do you need fresh air?”
“Are you thirsty?”
Stuart nodded to the last question, and one of the triplets ran outside again.
“Where
are
we?” asked April, for about the fortieth time.
“In the big old shed in the corner of Dad’s builder’s yard,” said the other girl. “It occurred to me that he might be able to store the tricks for a while, so I called him. And he happened to have a van coming back from a job, so they went straight to the museum and picked up everything. Rod Felton was very grateful.”
“So all the illusions are in here?” asked April. She pulled a tarpaulin away from some veiled lumps in the corner. “They’ve dumped the Book of Peril on its
side
,” she said indignantly.
“What I want to know,” said her sister, “is where you disappeared to. May waited outside the exhibition while I went to phone Dad, and she said that you never left the room. Obviously I didn’t believe her because she’s always such a nutcase, but when hours went by and you and Stuart didn’t turn up, we came back to look for you, and now I realize that May was actually right. So where were you? And how did you get into a locked shed?”
April shook her head. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s not just my secret, it’s Stuart’s.”
Running footsteps came from outside, and May reappeared with a cup and a large bottle of water. “Here you are,” she said, pouring a cupful for Stuart. “I filled it from the tap.” He drank it all, and she poured him another.
“So, Stuart,” said June, looking stern and serious. “I think it’s high time May and I knew what was really going on. We’ve told your dad that you’re working late at the museum, and we’ve told
our
parents that April’s gone around to your house—not to mention borrowing Dad’s keys without him knowing—and we’re tired of covering for both of you and we want to know the truth.”
Stuart glugged the second cupful of water and held it out for a refill.
“Because it’s not fair, is it, if we keep helping you but you don’t tell us anything?” said May screechily. “It’s not fair at all.”
He drank the third mugful, thought about a fourth, and then realized that he had begun to feel sick. Very, very sick.
“So come on, Stuart,” said June, folding her arms and using a phrase that she was ever afterward going to regret. “Spit it out.”
Stuart did.
He didn’t remember much about the journey home on the bus. He was feeling a bit like a strand of cooked spaghetti and lay limply across the double seat at the back, while the triplets looked at him anxiously.
Stuart’s father, when he opened the front door to his son, looked even more anxious.