Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms Read online

  “Mmm,” said Stuart. Actually, he didn’t know how he felt. It had been the oddest day of his entire life. He glanced up at his father. “What did Great-Uncle Tony look like?” he asked.

  “Well, he was dark-haired, I believe, and brown-eyed … and … er”—Stuart’s father hesitated for a moment—“not of exceptional stature.”

  “Do you mean he was really quite short?” said Stuart.

  “Rather below average height, I think, yes. There’s always been a considerable variation in the stature of the Horten male.”

  “You mean some of them are tall and some of them are short.”

  “That’s correct. Your great-uncle Tony’s brother Ray—my father, your grandfather—was over six feet tall. Whereas his father—my grandfather, that is—was … er … not so tall.”

  “You mean he was really short too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So being really short runs in the family?”

  “There is certainly some truth in that statement.”

  “So you mean I could end up being as short as Great-Uncle Tony?” Stuart had always thought that when he reached the age of twelve or thirteen he’d start to shoot up. He’d just assumed it would happen. “Dad?” he pressed, when there was no reply. “Dad?”

  There was more silence. And then for once, his father didn’t use an enormously long word, but simply patted him on the shoulder and said, “You’re a splendid chap, Stuart. We think the world of you.” Which was kind, but which didn’t really answer the question.

  And when his mother got home (very late, as usual) Stuart asked her the same thing, and she got out a pencil and paper and medical textbooks, and gave him a twenty-five-minute lecture on the genetics of height. He didn’t understand much of it, but he understood the answer, when it eventually came.

  It was “Yes.” Even though his mother was tall and his father was tall, it was possible that Stuart could end up as short as Great-Uncle Tony. Teeny-Tiny Great-Uncle Tony.

  “And what are you going to do tomorrow?” asked his mother, trying to change the subject.

  “Don’t know,” said Stuart.

  The next day, he woke very early. He could hear his mother in the kitchen filling the tea kettle. He fell asleep again, and woke a second time to hear her softly closing the front door on her way to work. Everything went quiet for a moment. Then suddenly he heard the sound of running footsteps outside the house, followed by the snap of the mail slot and the slap of something landing on the mat.

  He went downstairs. There was a flimsy newspaper lying on the floor of the hall. Right in the middle of the front page was a huge picture of Stuart. It showed him climbing over the gate of Great-Uncle Tony’s house, a furtive expression on his face. He stared down at it, horrified, and then slowly, slowly, he picked up the paper and began to read.

  THE BEECH ROAD GUARDIAN

  Special crime edition!!

  New Neighbors

  Number 20 Beech Road has seen the arrival of the Horten family. Extensive research has revealed Mrs. Horten to be a doctor, Mr. Horten to be someone who sits around reading things, and their son, Stuart Horten (10, but looks younger), to be a potential BURGLAR! Yes! A BURGLAR! Or a VANDAL! Only one day after moving into the neighborhood he was observed trying to break into a house on Filbert Way, and only the prompt action of our reporter prevented a MAJOR CRIME.

  Read full story on page 2!!!!!

  Stuart turned to page two.

  HOW I FOILED THE FILBERT WAY BREAK-IN

  By our photographic correspondent

  It was a warm day and I had just taken a pleasant bike ride around the block, when I happened to glance at a derelict house on Filbert Way. Imagine my surprise when I recognized my new neighbor, Stuart Horten (10, but looks younger), climbing over the gate, obviously up to no good. He then tried to break through a side window, before—

  Stuart couldn’t face reading any more. The article took up the whole of page two. Page three contained some unflattering photographs of his family, taken on the day they moved in.

  Page four (the back page) was titled “Other News,” and was obviously copied from the local paper, as it was dull stuff about construction work and trash-emptying days. At the bottom was a small picture, captioned Our ever-ready staff. April, May, and June Kingley. Three identical, clever-looking faces stared up at him. Actually, they were not quite identical. One of them (was it April?) was wearing glasses.

  There was a noise from upstairs—his father’s bedroom door opening—and Stuart hurriedly crumpled the newspaper into a ball. By the time his dad arrived in the kitchen, the paper was right at the bottom of the bin and Stuart was sitting eating a bowl of cornflakes.

  “Ah, fully conscious, I see,” said his father. “Any plans for today?”

  “Not really,” said Stuart.

  “Another trip to the library?”

  “Not yet, thanks,” said Stuart.

  “Or how about the Beeton Museum? I was looking at a leaflet in the library.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Stuart.

  “It’s quite a good one, I understand,” his father told him. “With a collection of special interest for the numismatologist.”

  Perhaps, thought Stuart, he ought to tattoo a question mark on his forehead and just point to it whenever his father spoke. “For the what?”

  “For the coin collector.”

  “Oh,” said Stuart. He thought suddenly of yesterday, of the coin that he’d put into the phone booth, of the phone mysteriously ringing, and all at once he knew exactly what his plans were for the day. He looked around and saw the other threepenny bits sitting in a neat pile on the windowsill.

  “Dad?” he said. “Can I go for a bike ride?”

  CHAPTER 6

  He rode straight to the phone booth. As he locked up his bike he could feel himself getting nervous, his heart pounding, his breath shallow. Would it happen a second time? Could it be possible?

  There was no one inside the booth. Stuart pulled open the door and was hit by the awful smell again. Since yesterday someone had dropped a whole bag of french fries on the floor. He edged around the mess, waited until the door was closed and then took one of the threepenny bits from his pocket. It shone dully in the dim light.

  “Okay,” said Stuart. “Let’s try it.”

  He reached for the phone receiver.

  It wasn’t there.

  He looked around wildly. It wasn’t anywhere. Someone had taken it.

  And there was something odd, too, about the slot for the money. It was white rather than black. He peered at it closely and saw that it had been stuffed full of chewing gum.

  Well, then, that was that. Glumly, he pocketed the threepence again and pushed open the door.

  There seemed no point in going straight back to his horrible new home, next to his horrible new neighbors. He unlocked his bike and cycled slowly through the town. He passed a park with a playground and an old bandstand. The bandstand looked vaguely familiar. He glanced down a side street and saw a crowd of people waiting in line outside an old movie theater; that too reminded him of something. It wasn’t until he saw the sign for the station that he realized he’d seen all of these places in the book of photographs in the library. The places were older now, and shabbier, but still recognizable.

  He felt strange. He felt as if someone was trying very hard to tell him something, but he couldn’t quite catch the words. There was a bicycle rack outside the station, and he parked his bike. The main entrance was fenced off and displayed a sign saying DANGER! HARD HAT AREA, so Stuart followed an arrow around to the side of the building and entered through an arch beside the ticket office.

  The interior of the station was a construction site. Green wooden panels blocked off most of the concourse, and behind them scaffolding reached as high as the glass roof. A thin film of dust covered everything, and there was a constant whine of power tools.

  Every few feet, a poster had been stuck to the boards.

  Stuart p
ressed his eye to a tiny gap between two panels and saw a man in protective goggles cutting a block of stone. A fountain of sparks rose from the circular blade. Close by, another man was scouring the blackened bricks of the wall with a spinning disc. Slowly a rosy color was emerging from beneath the layers of soot.

  Suddenly Stuart noticed an odd thing. Near the second man, on a part of the wall that was still dirty, there was one incredibly clean patch. The patch had a definite shape—a tall, thin rectangle topped with a large circle—and it was bright pink against the surrounding black, each brick looking perfectly new. Something must have been standing in front of that wall for a hundred years or more, protecting it from the smoke and dirt.

  And he knew that shape.

  It was the shape of the weighing machine in the photograph, the one that the little boy had been standing in front of. And he understood, somehow, that he had to find it.

  He moved along the panels from one end to the other, squinting carefully through every gap, but there was no sign of the weighing machine. He opened a door marked NO ACCESS TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC and got shouted at by a worker. He ventured cautiously around the fencing sheets that obscured the main entrance and was shouted at by the same worker, who this time threatened to call the police.

  It was just after that, as Stuart stood beside the bike rack wondering what to do next, that another man pushing a wheelbarrow full of splintered wood and chunks of plaster walked out of the blocked-off entrance and straight past him. Man and wheelbarrow disappeared behind a plywood screen at the end of the parking lot. There was a brief series of crashes, and then they reappeared. This time the wheelbarrow was empty.

  Stuart waited until the parking lot was clear of people, and then ran for the wooden screen. Behind it was a large yellow dumpster, piled high with trash. A wide plank slanted up to it from the ground, and Stuart walked along it and peered over the edge. He saw the weighing machine right away. It was right in the center of the dumpster, leaning at an angle. Cautiously, he picked his way toward it, tiptoeing across broken boards that tipped and swayed beneath his feet.

  There were three parts to the machine: a square platform at the bottom, just large enough for one person to stand on; a large round dial at the top, covered in glass; and a rectangular upright part linking the two. The whole thing had once been painted red, but over the years it had been scratched and written on, and the glass over the dial was cracked in several places.

  On the base was a small plaque. It read:

  Stuart took out a threepenny bit. This time he didn’t hesitate, but pushed it straight in.

  Nothing happened.

  He looked at the instructions again: Place coin in slot and stand on platform. Tentatively he put one foot and then the other on the slanted platform. There was a click, and the long needle swung slowly around the dial and halted beside a number.

  79.

  And just above the number, scratched onto the red-painted metal of the casing, two words were visible. Stuart craned to read them—craned and stretched and stood on tiptoe—and as he did so, there was an ominous groaning sound. The contents of the dumpster began to shift. All around him were cracking noises. Puffs of plaster dust filled the air. The weighing machine started to sink treacherously beneath his feet and rivulets of grit poured into the hole. Stuart clawed his way upward. For a brief moment he was on the same level as the dial, and the writing was close enough for him to read—it said GRAVEST FLATE—and then he had scrambled past it and was almost dancing across the moving surface, arms flailing, grabbing for the plank at the edge. He climbed onto it, breathing heavily, and looked back. Only the very top of the weighing machine was visible; the rest lay buried beneath the rubble.

  Stuart sneezed and then sneezed again. He was covered in white dust, he realized, and his heart was beating wildly. He felt almost happy. And more than happy; excited.

  The first threepence had shown him a book, and the second had given him a message:

  GRAVEST FLATE. 79.

  And now he just had to work out what on earth it meant.

  CHAPTER 7

  Stuart hurried home and wrote down the clue before he could forget it, and then he sat and stared at it for nearly half an hour.

  GRAVEST FLATE.

  79.

  He looked up gravest in the dictionary, just to check that it meant “most serious.” It did. He looked up the word flate. It wasn’t in there.

  He turned the piece of paper the wrong way up and looked at the letters upside down for a while. Then he realized that he was starting to feel hungry. He went to the fridge and made himself a cream-cheese, sliced-pickle, tomato-relish, and salt-and- vinegar potato-chip sandwich, which he ate while pacing around the kitchen.

  GRAVEST FLATE.

  “I used to love anagrams at your age,” remarked his father, wandering into the room. “Did you know you can rearrange the letters of Horten to make the words throne and hornet?”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Stuart.

  “And your own first name,” continued his father, “is an anagram of Rattus, which is, of course, the Latin for rat. And the word Beeton—”

  “Why are you talking about anagrams?” asked Stuart.

  “That piece of paper you left on the dining-room table,” said his father, “I assumed it must be—”

  Stuart was back in the dining room before his father could finish the sentence. If the clue was an anagram, then all he needed to do was rearrange the letters, and—hey, presto! (as Great-Uncle Tony might have said)—he’d have the answer.

  He took a pencil, sat down, and began to think.

  GRAVEST FLATE.

  He rested his chin on his hands and thought harder. The more intensely he stared at the letters, the larger they seemed to get.

  Larger.

  LARGE. All of a sudden he could see the word LARGE.

  Feverishly, he began to rearrange the remaining letters.

  FAV TEST.

  No.

  FAST VET.

  No.

  FAT VEST.

  For a moment, he hesitated.

  LARGE FAT VEST.

  He shook his head. That couldn’t be right. He turned the paper over and started again.

  An hour later, he had a headache and six more anagrams:

  A FLAG REST VET

  A RAFT VET GELS

  STAGE FLAT REV

  FALTER GAS VET

  LARVA FEST GET

  and

  GAVEL FART SET.

  None of them made any sense at all.

  “I think I might go for a moderately lengthy perambulation,” said his father. “Would you care to accompany me?”

  “No, thanks,” said Stuart.

  He heard his father’s footsteps go out into the hall, stop for a second, and then return.

  “An epistle for you,” said his father, placing an envelope on the table.

  Stuart frowned.

  Typed on the front of the envelope was: S. HORTEN.

  He waited until his father had left the house before he opened it.

  Dear Mr. S. Horten,

  The special crime edition of the Beech Road Guardian has been causing excitement and discussion the length and breadth of the Beech Road area. “When are you going to write more about this serious and important story?” our readers have been asking us.

  In response to popular demand, therefore, we would like to offer you, Mr. S. Horten, the chance to give your side of the story. Was there, in fact, an innocent reason for your attempt to smash your way into 9 Filbert Way?

  In return for exclusive rights, we will print a special “Stuart Horten Says He’s Innocent!” edition of the Beech Road Guardian, featuring a front-page interview with yourself and a voting slip for our readers to decide whether—

  Stuart didn’t bother reading any more. He crammed the letter back into the envelope, grabbed a red felt-tip pen, crossed out his own name, and wrote

  NO, NOT IN A MILLION YEARS

  in very large letters ove
r the top of it. Then he turned over the envelope and scrawled

  LEAVE ME ALONE

  across the flap.

  Snatching it from the table, he walked out of his house and right to the one next door. He shoved the envelope through the mail slot, retraced his steps, and found that his own front door had clicked shut behind him. He gave it a shove. It stayed shut. He was locked out.

  He looked around. The road was empty, his father nowhere to be seen. In the upstairs window of the triplets’ house a curtain moved and three identical faces peered down at him; they appeared to be smirking.

  He felt like an idiot, a total idiot, and he wanted to run as far and as fast as possible, but he forced himself to walk calmly and steadily away from the house. He even stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled a little, as if he’d decided on the spur of the moment to go for a stroll. He didn’t think the sisters were fooled.

  Once he’d reached the end of the road, he slowed to a dawdle. His father was likely to be away for an hour or more, so there was no point in hurrying. For a while he walked aimlessly, taking alternate lefts and rights, thinking all the time of his old house, his old friends, of all the ease and fun of his life before he’d come to this awful place. It wasn’t until he took a left turn and found himself walking toward a brick wall that he started to pay attention.

  It was a dead-end street, lined with old warehouses. A few cars were parked along the curb, but there were no people about. Somewhere a dog was barking, and curled in front of the brick wall at the end was a marmalade-colored cat. Stuart went over to stroke it, but it hissed at him and darted away. He watched it disappear along a narrow alleyway between two of the warehouses.

  CRIBB’S PASSAGE, read a sign at the end of the alleyway, LEADING FROM POTTERS RD. TO GRAVE ST.

  Stuart blinked, and read it again.

  Leading from Potters Rd. to Grave St.

  GRAVE STREET.

  GRAVEST.

  The clue wasn’t an anagram; it was an address! He broke into a run, following the marmalade cat through the shadowy alley between the warehouses and emerged into a street of tall terraced houses. The cat was visible, sitting on the top step of a house with a red front door, and this time, as Stuart approached, it rose to greet him, rubbing its nose across his shins.