Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (12 page)

CHAPTER 18

Cycling with a scrapbook under his arm wasn’t easy, and halfway home, as Stuart rounded a corner, the book slid out from under his elbow, spinning ahead of him along the road, pages fluttering. A newspaper clipping detached itself from the last page, and Stuart got off his bike and chased the slip of paper along the sidewalk.

As he grabbed it and shoved it back into the book, he realized that he could hear running footsteps behind him and he turned and saw a chunky man in green trousers tearing around the corner at full speed, arms pumping like a sprinter. A second later the man saw Stuart, stopped dead, spun on his heel, and darted back out of view again.

Stuart stood staring. He’d recognized the man. It was Clifford, the trainee magician. Overhead, a white dove flew in a lazy loop and settled on top of a lamppost.

Jeannie’s ordered him to follow me
, thought Stuart.
She’s hoping that I’ll lead the way to the workshop
.

He got back on his bike again and pedaled off very slowly. He took the next left, cycled halfway along the road, then shoved his bike under a parked car and crouched behind it. Sure enough, thirty seconds later, pounding footsteps approached. They thundered straight past and around the next corner. Grinning, Stuart got his bike out again and rode home in the other direction.

He felt full of purpose and energy, and as soon as he’d hidden the scrapbook in his room and had eaten a bag of potato chips, a ham sandwich, four pickled onions, a lump of cheese, two more pickled onions, and another bag of potato chips, he was ready to set out again.

“Whither your current destination?” asked his father.

“The library. Mom said they’d phoned me yesterday about a book.”

“Oh, splendid. Do you mind if I accompany you?”

They walked there together, and Stuart waited until his father was transfixed by volume three of
The History of European Lexicography
before he set off for the information desk.

“Aha!” said the same man as before, his glasses still dangling on a chain around his neck. “It’s our local history scholar. Stay there just a moment.”

He disappeared into a back room, and Stuart waited impatiently, drumming his fingers on the desktop.

“And here we are,” said the man, reappearing. “We’ve re-inserted the missing photograph. Do not forget the gloves.”

Stuart took the little book over to a table and eased the white gloves onto his fingers. He opened
Modern Beeton: A Photographic Record
and spotted a little paragraph that he hadn’t noticed before, tucked away in tiny print at the bottom of the title page:

This booklet was commissioned by
Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms as a
permanent record of the firm’s contribution
to the life of twentieth-century Beeton.

Stuart started to thumb through, and this time it was like looking at a family album. The little boy that was Great-Uncle Tony gazed out from every page, making a different face in each. First in the phone booth, then beside the weighing machine, then by the swimming-pool turnstile …

“And
that’s
the order I found them in!” said Stuart out loud.

There was a fierce “
Shhh!
” from the man behind the counter.

Stuart hunched down, embarrassed, took a piece of scrap paper and a pencil, and started to make a list:

1. Main Street. Phone booth. FOUND IT.
   
2. Station. Weighing machine. FOUND IT.
   
3. Outdoor swimming pool. Turnstile. FOUND IT.
   
4. Movie theater/bingo hall. Toffee machine.
   
5. Gas station.
   

In this photo, Great-Uncle Tony was doing a handstand against the side of the building, where Stuart had seen the bicycle-repair sign. His booted feet were resting on a tall metal box on four legs.

Stuart stared at the box for a while, then shrugged and wrote “???? machine” before turning the page.

6. Fairground.

Pictured were a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round, a shoot-the-duck stall, and a cotton-candy booth. There was even a ghost train, decorated with some badly drawn phantoms and a wildly screaming girl. Great-Uncle Tony was in the photograph, of course, in the background, standing on one foot and miming a kick at a passing boy with the other. Just behind him was an odd-looking object. It looked like a huge, upright ruler as tall as Stuart’s father. At the top of it was a round bell, and written down the side of the ruler were the words:

TEST
YOUR
STRENGTH

What appeared to be an enormous mallet on a rope was hanging from a hook beside it.

Stuart added the words Strength machine? to the list. Then he turned the page and saw, for the first time, the missing photo.

Ancient and modern together: a young man of today encounters the past
read the caption. The “young man” was Great-Uncle Tony, and for once he was right at the center of the picture. He was standing in a large, rather grand room, gazing at a glass cabinet filled with what looked like tiny buttons. Behind him were other cabinets, also filled with buttons. Stuart frowned, wrote:

7. ????

And then he turned to the last picture.

8. Bandstand.

The bandstand stood in the middle of the park. The bulletin board fixed to its base had a poster that said
SUNDAY CONCERTS
, and next to it, on the grass, sat Uncle Tony playing an imaginary trumpet. Stuart looked at the photo close-up, his nose almost touching the page, and then again from a distance. He even turned it upside down, just in case he was missing something. Finally he gave up and turned back to the photograph of Uncle Tony and the buttons.

Cabinets of buttons. Shiny buttons. Shiny metal buttons.

No, Stuart realized suddenly. They weren’t
buttons
at all.

Hurriedly he returned the book to the desk. You weren’t supposed to run in the library, but he ran, and found his father in the reference section.

“Dad,” he said breathlessly. “Remember a few days ago you said something about coins to me?”

“Coins …?” said his father dreamily, his finger still marking his place in
The History of European Lexicography
, his brain elsewhere.

“
Coins
,” repeated Stuart, slowly and firmly. “You said something about a collection being of interest to a newsymatolly something.”

“Aha!” His father’s face lit up. “You’re talking about the Horten Numismatology Collection in Beeton Museum. Apparently it’s splendid.”

“The
Horten
Numi-whatsit Collection?”

“Yes.”

“What, it’s named after our
family
?”

“I believe so.”

“But you didn’t tell me it was called that!”

“Oh, didn’t I?” said his father, with infuriating vagueness.

“
No
. Never mind. Can we go there?” asked Stuart. “Can we go there
right now
?”

CHAPTER 19

“Hello,” said the woman at the desk. “Does this little fellow want the young explorer’s backpack?”

“No,” said Stuart.

“It’s got stickers!” said the woman, encouragingly.

“No,” said Stuart more firmly.

His father was standing beside him in the foyer of the museum gazing at a scale model of a Roman catapult.

“Of course, the Latin name,
ballista
, is the root of our modern word
ballistics
,” he said, to no one in particular.

Stuart was looking at the museum map on the wall. Most of the rooms seemed to be filled with an exhibition about Beeton during the Second World War, but there were one or two that were labeled
MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS
. He needed a bit of time to poke about on his own.

“If you’re interested in ballistae,” said a loud voice behind him, “then you’ll find a further collection of Roman siege engines in room four.”

Stuart turned to see a man in a checked suit. He was wearing a badge that said
ROD FELTON, CHIEF
CURATOR
, and he looked enormously enthusiastic, in a toothy sort of way.

“In particular, there is the post-classical example known as an onager,” he added.

Stuart’s father looked up keenly. “I believe the name
onager
is also the Latin for
wild ass
,” he said.

Rod Felton almost jumped with delight. “That’s absolutely correct. It’s derived from the kicking action of the machine, which in turn is the result of torsional pressure from a twisted rope. And the later medieval version, the mangonel, was also a …”

With any luck, thought Stuart, they’ll be yakking for half an hour. Unnoticed, he slipped past the desk into the museum.

Hardly anyone else was in there. He passed a 1940s classroom and a 1940s grocery store, and then walked through a screened-off section containing a backyard air-raid shelter with a set of bunk beds inside. As he did so, a siren sounded and all the lights went off, and there was a short pause before a tape of bombing noises began. He carried on walking.

“Beeton in Wartime” continued—there were photographs and leaflets and posters, and a large-scale model of the town showing where bombs had dropped and where underground shelters had been built. Stuart lingered briefly over the model. It was very neatly made, with lots of detail, and he was just tracing the route he’d taken the day before when he heard the curator’s voice bellowing from somewhere behind him.

“The weapon known as the trebuchet, or trebucket, on the other hand, was employed in the Middle Ages during sieges in order to …”

Stuart broke into a jog and raced through the rest of the wartime exhibition. The next room contained Roman weaponry and armor, and the one after that a collection of Victorian tools and farm implements, as well as a large fake cow being milked by a huge fake milkmaid and an enormous fake horse being shoed by a giant fake blacksmith.

Stuart hurried toward the next door, and paused. There was a small brass plaque screwed to the central panel:

THE NUMISMATOLOGICAL ROOM
ENDOWED 1922 BY
HORTEN’S MIRACULOUS MECHANISMS

He pushed open the door and found himself staring at the view he’d seen earlier in the photograph: the glass cabinet containing Roman coins, the array of coin-filled cases beyond. Behind them was a tall row of display boards, showing
HOW
MONEY IS MADE
, with cartoonish illustrations.

Stuart walked around the display and caught his breath. Beneath the window stood three large, old, coin-operated machines.

He walked toward them, feeling as if he were moving in slow motion. They were situated on stone blocks, roped off from the rest of the room, and a sign on the wall above them read:

VINTAGE COIN-OPERATED MACHINERY
FROM A VARIETY OF BEETON
BUSINESSES, MANUFACTURED BY
HORTEN’S MIRACULOUS MECHANISMS.
COLLECTED AND DONATED
TO BEETON MUSEUM
BY MR. ANTHONY HORTEN.
DO NOT TOUCH!

Stuart read the sign again, scarcely able to believe his eyes.
Collected and donated by Mr. Anthony Horten!
It was as if Great-Uncle Tony were standing right here, grinning, giving him the thumbs up, and urging him onward.

Three machines
, thought Stuart.

Three numbers needed for the safe
.

And all at once he knew, with utter certainty, that this was where he would find the combination.

He ducked under the rope and climbed onto the stone blocks.

To his left stood the movie theater toffee machine. It was a square metal box on legs, with the words
CHOOSE OUR CHEWS
! stamped on the front, and a picture of a toffee with a bite taken out of it. There was a slot for a coin at the top and a hole for dispensing the toffees at the bottom.