Horten's Incredible Illusions Read online

  “April?” he called. There was no reply. She was in whatever world the magic star had flung her into. Now all he had to do was wait.

  It was massively uncomfortable, the safety strap digging into his stomach, the blood rushing to his head. He braced his arms and legs against the sides to take the weight off the strap, and wondered how long he’d have to stay there. He started counting, and got to two thousand before losing track of the numbers.

  Time passed. It was quite warm in the interior of the Reappearing Rose Bower, and despite his awkward position, he began to feel sleepy. He tapped out a couple of tunes on the metal walls, and then searched his pockets to see whether he had anything interesting in them. It took a bit of wriggling, but he discovered a piece of candy, a paper clip, and a peach pit. He dropped them, one by one, into the darkness. He wondered what the dog was doing. He wondered what his mom was doing. He tried to think of what the dog’s name might be—Great-Uncle Tony’s message had said it began with Ch: Chance. Chocco. Charlie. Charlie was a good name. Stuart yawned.

  He was woken by his head banging against the wall. The whole mechanism was lurching, tipping, swaying, moving. It was being carried. He could hear muffled voices and the rattling of a metal roller door.

  The Reappearing Rose Bower was set down with a crash, and Stuart banged his head again. The metal door rattled down, another door slammed violently, an engine started with a deep growling note, and the Reappearing Rose Bower jerked forward. Stuart banged his head for the third time, but he was panicking too much to think about the pain. He was panicking because it was clear that he was no longer in the museum but in the back of a truck.

  He was in the back of a truck and he was being driven away.

  CHAPTER 23

  As April watched Stuart climb onto the throne of the Reappearing Rose Bower, pull the lever, and disappear from sight, she clutched the magic star in her hand and tried to keep her breathing steady.

  One of the disadvantages of being a triplet was that she hardly ever did anything on her own—there was always at least one sister tagging along. Now she had the prospect of a whole magical world which she could explore without interference, and she felt almost dizzy with excitement. It took her a moment or two to realize that, mingled with the excitement, there was a good dollop of nervousness. It was always easier to be brave when you were with someone else.

  She could hear Stuart pulling the lever again. The mechanism clicked and ratcheted, and the silver stems eased apart to reveal the empty throne. At its center was the socket for the star.

  “You okay?” she called to Stuart, and heard a vague noise by way of an answer.

  She stepped forward, and at the same moment the dog skittered across from where it had been lurking and bounded onto the seat. It looked at her keenly.

  “Do you want to come too?” asked April. The prospect of not being quite on her own was rather nice. “I’ll be off then,” she shouted, laying one hand on the dog’s head and, with the other, placing the three-pointed star in its socket.

  And, like a page turning, the view changed.

  April was in the most splendid room she had ever seen. The bronze throne was still directly in front of her, but now it stood on a velvet dais, and red and purple silk banners swayed gently from the ceiling.

  The windows were high and narrow, and she could see nothing out of them except treetops and darting birds.

  The walls were gold and hung with tapestries, their colors brilliant and fresh: stags leaping through green woodlands and white castles standing in meadows jeweled with flowers.

  The floor had a carpet so soft that her feet sank gently with every step. April reached down and stroked it, and it was like brushing the gossamer coat of a puppy.

  Which reminded her of the little dog—she looked around and saw it had jumped off the throne and was sniffing around the edge of the room.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she wondered aloud. “What’s the puzzle?”

  It was really odd not having anyone to talk to. She had the sudden wild thought that Stuart might have come with her to this magical palace, and she knocked on the throne and shouted, “Stuart, are you there?” but there was no answer.

  He must still be in the museum, and she thought of him hanging upside-down, getting a cramp in his legs and nausea in his stomach, and she knew that she had to hurry up with her task.

  As she turned away from the throne, she thought she saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she spun around there was no one there—or at least, no one real. There was a painting, though, that she hadn’t taken note of before: a full-length portrait of a queen in royal robes, sitting on a throne.

  She walked toward it and again seemed to see someone moving, and her heart started thudding painfully. It wasn’t until she was near enough to touch it that she identified the source of the movement. Instead of a painted face, the portrait had a small oval mirror set into the canvas.

  Standing below it, April could only see a reflection of one of the windows, but a thought occurred to her, and she walked back to the platform on which the Reappearing Rose Bower stood. She climbed the steps, sat down on the bronze throne, and looked straight ahead at the portrait.

  And now it was herself—her own face, fitting perfectly into the oval mirror, above a painted body adorned with finery. A blue fur-trimmed cloak was draped over her shoulders, an enormous diamond ring glinted on one finger, a scepter (like a golden rolling pin) was in her right hand, an orb (like a baseball carved out of a giant ruby) in her left. On her head was a crown, the stones a brilliant green.

  April grinned at herself, but the grin didn’t really match the regal sternness of the pose. She tried a frown instead and it looked much better.

  “Right,” she said, “and now what?”

  There were no obvious doors out of the room, but she remembered Stuart’s description of the gallery he’d gone into, where every painting was a door, and she went back to the portrait and gave the right-hand side of the frame a sharp tug. It opened so quickly and smoothly that she almost fell over. She looked into the room beyond, and almost fell over again.

  It was all flash and dazzle: a million facets catching the light, a blue blaze of sapphires, pearls like creamy jawbreakers, amethysts like blobs of blackberry jam, tigers’ eyes, opals and rubies, emeralds the moist green of new leaves, diamonds like chips of shattered ice, and everywhere the warm gleam of gold and the cold glitter of silver.

  A treasure room.

  A treasure room that looked as if someone had turned it upside-down and given it a good shake or else taken the roof off and stirred it with a giant stick.

  “What a mess,” said April, out loud. “What a complete and utter mess.”

  She climbed over the parapet into the room. Priceless necklaces and rings with stones the size of grapes lay in tangled piles across the floor, rows of shelves around the walls bore stacks of random jewelry, and in the center of the room, a tall gold candleholder in the shape of the sun was festooned with crowns and bracelets, as if it were a hatstand. There were open chests crammed with treasure, chairs draped with it, and a cabinet whose every drawer was stuffed with objects. There was even a small table off to one side where somebody had left a half-eaten slice of bread and cheese balanced on top of an absolute pillar of crowns, stacked up like bricks. The cheese was the sort that her father adored—crumbly, streaked with blue mold, and hideously smelly. And someone—probably the same person—had drunk some red wine as well, leaving the empty goblet on its side beneath the table.

  The only object that wasn’t completely covered with priceless items was a small stepstool, standing on its own in one corner.

  Something about it made April feel weirdly uncomfortable. She stared at it, fishing around in her memory, and realized after a moment or two that it reminded her of the Time-Out Stool that April (or May, or June—but usually April) had had to sit on as a small child when she’d been naughty. “Stay there for five minutes and hav
e a good think about what you need to change about your behavior,” her mom had always said. Ever since, April had preferred to do her thinking at speed … and standing up.

  She did it now, closing her eyes tightly, and—as usual—the solution popped almost instantly into her brain.

  “The picture,” she said, with absolute certainty. “I have to find the objects that are in the picture, and put them on. A crown with emeralds, a cloak with fur, a diamond ring, a gold scepter, and a ruby orb.”

  Quickly she started to scan the room, and saw a diamond ring poking out of the coils of a pearl necklace on the floor nearby. She bent down to disentangle it, and then did a sort of screaming hop as a mouse shot out from underneath and zigzagged toward a corner of the room.

  From the door in the wall came an answering yap, and the dog stuck its nose over the parapet.

  “Thanks,” said April, scooping it up and setting it down in the treasure room. “Just keep the mouse away, would you? Not that I’m afraid of mice, of course—I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  Cautiously she had another try at untangling the ring, and realized that the pearl necklace was also wrapped around a crown—a crown with green stones.

  “Two down,” she said, hooking the heavy crown over one arm and looking around for the next object. “Three to go. Easy peasy.”

  It was at the exact moment she said the word peasy that she noticed another crown with green stones lying on the floor next to the candleholder. It looked exactly the same as the first.

  “Right,” she said to herself, a bit less certainly. She moved her head a tiny bit and saw yet another one, right at the top of the tower of crowns on the cheese table. And a fourth on one of the shelves that ran around the wall. And she could see what looked like a fifth and a sixth hanging on a chair arm—and she couldn’t help spotting at least six ruby orbs, several scepters, and umpteen diamond rings, twinkling amid the golden chaos.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay,” she announced to the room in a decisive voice. “What this place needs is some organization. Fast.”

  CHAPTER 24

  She timed herself on her watch. Thirty-five minutes of nonstop action later, she had collected a total of fifteen emerald crowns and had stacked them in the throne room beside the Reappearing Rose Bower. Next to the crowns she’d assembled four other piles, consisting of nine diamond rings, ten orbs, thirteen scepters, and four fur-trimmed cloaks, all of which seemed to have attracted moths. April stopped to catch her breath; it had never occurred to her that gold was so incredibly heavy.

  “So now,” she said, “I just have to find which ones are the right ones.”

  She picked up the least moth-eaten of the four cloaks and draped it around her shoulders; it was miles too long for her. Then she slipped on one of the rings, picked up an orb and scepter, and grabbed the top crown on the stack and placed it on her head. Feeling as if she were a contestant in a dress-up competition, she next shuffled across to the throne, cloak dragging behind her, and sat down.

  Her own face, pink with exertion, looked back at her from the portrait.

  Nothing happened.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s try another lot.”

  She took off the jewelry and the cloak and dumped it all to one side, went over to start dressing herself in a whole new set—and then suddenly had a thought. An awful, chilling thought.

  What if she’d been wearing the right crown but all the other items had been wrong? Or what if it had been the right cloak but the wrong crown, ring, orb, and scepter? Or the right orb, the right crown, the right cloak, and the right ring but the wrong scepter? It was no good, she realized, just randomly going through the piles—she would have to try on every possible combination.

  “And there must be hundreds,” she said out loud. “Maybe thousands! It’ll take hours and hours and hours, and Stuart’s going to be upside-down in the museum the entire time.” She could feel herself beginning to panic, and her insides felt cold and hollow.

  “I must be doing it wrong,” she exclaimed, her voice a pathetic squeak. “I’ve missed something—I must have.”

  She ran back to the treasure room and looked around desperately. The dog was still nosing about. Its stumpy tail wagged when it saw her. April scooped it up and gave it a quick cuddle. And then, since she definitely needed to do some proper thinking (and not just closing her eyes and waiting for inspiration, the way she normally did), she picked her way between the piles of treasure, sat down on the little stepstool right in the corner of the room, and put her chin in her hand.

  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?