Horten's Incredible Illusions Page 7

  “You could take the whole class. Wouldn’t matter how tall you are then, they’d really respect you. Take the whole class, except anyone who’s mean to you. Buy a Rolls-Royce and a chauffeur to drive you to school, and only give rides to the kids you like. Buy a house with a swimming pool in the backyard, and see how nice everyone is to you then. Friendship’s like any other commodity, Stuart. You can buy it if you have enough money …”

  Stuart’s chest was thudding as if someone inside it were banging a drum.

  “You still there?” asked Miss Edie.

  “Yes.”

  “You have a real think about what I said. Find that will, and I can make your dreams come true. They won’t call you the shortest kid in class any more; they’ll call you the richest …”

  “But—”

  Before Stuart could say any more, the line went dead.

  CHAPTER 16

  He stood staring at the silent receiver, and then something tugged insistently at the back of his mind, and he fetched the tin money box in which he kept his most treasured possessions, and took out Great-Uncle Tony’s note.

  use the star to find the letters, and when you have all six, they’ll lead you to my w

  “Lead you to my will,” said Stuart quietly.

  So that was it, then—the letters were clues that would lead him to his great-uncle’s will, and when he found it, he would have a choice.

  For a strange moment he felt as if he were standing on a bridge over a dark, rushing river. On one side of the bridge was a feast of magic: Great-Uncle Tony’s illusions and the bizarre adventures that Stuart and April were finding within them. On the other side was a fabulous world of money, glittering with all the things that Stuart could buy, if only he were rich. He stood poised in the center of the bridge, like an iron filing between two magnets.

  Then his father called him from downstairs and he found himself back in the real world, ravenously hungry, and a bit ashamed of himself.

  “Sorry, Dad,” he mumbled, coming into the kitchen. “Sorry I was rude to you.”

  “Expiation delightedly accepted. I surmise that you were sorely in need of sustenance and therefore I have prepared a porcine-based comestible.”

  He waved a hand toward the table, and Stuart looked at the large, delicious-looking sandwich, stuffed with bacon and oozing tomato ketchup. And then he looked at all the other things that his father had spent the entire afternoon cooking.

  “Can I have some soup as well?” he asked. “And maybe a small slice of the vegetable flan and a bit of salad. Just a small bit?”

  After five minutes of steady chomping, Stuart felt much fuller and much, much healthier.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  His father was looking thoughtful. “Do you think it might aid mutual colloquy if I endeavored to converse in a less polysyllabic manner?” he asked.

  “What does mutual colloquy mean?”

  “Our conversation.”

  “And endeavor means try, doesn’t it?”

  “Indubitably.”

  “So what you’re saying is, Would it be easier for us to talk if you used shorter words?“

  “Yes.”

  Stuart nodded cautiously. “Well, it might speed things up a bit. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I confess to a mild sense of curiosity about your recently completed telephonic communi—” His father paused and swallowed. “Your phone call,” he said, rather slowly, as if speaking a foreign language. “Who was it from?”

  “A very old lady. She knew about Great-Uncle Tony’s workshop being found, and she wants to buy all the tricks. She’s says she’s very rich. Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever wanted to be rich?”

  “Such an ambition has never come within the compass of—” His father stopped and cleared his throat.

  “I mean to convey that I have always engaged in wider considerations than—” He cleared his throat again.

  “No,” he said simply. “There are more important things than money.”

  In the brief silence Stuart heard April shouting his name from the backyard.

  “Can I go and see her?” he asked, and instead of saying something like you have my unconditional assent, his dad just smiled and replied, “Yes.” And Stuart thought, with a burst of pleasure, how much simpler life would be if his father stuck to this new way of talking.

  The fence between the yards always made Stuart feel especially short; it was too high for him to see over, whereas April was tall enough to comfortably rest her chin on it. She was standing on her side of it, sucking a bright-blue popsicle.

  “Hello,” she said. “You look all weird and excited about something. What’s going on?”

  “Well, I had this mysterious phone call and—”

  The entire top of April’s popsicle broke off in her mouth, and she let out a piercing scream.

  Stuart stared at her.

  “It’s cold,” she wailed madly, hopping from foot to foot. “My teeth have gone all tingly. Ooooh! It’s like pins and needles only in my teeeeeeeeth!”

  Stuart folded his arms. “You’re not April,” he said.

  “What?”

  “She wouldn’t make a fuss about something like that. You must be May.”

  Instantly April popped up from where she’d been hiding behind the fence, next to her sister.

  “Very good,” she said. “We were just testing you. I lent May my glasses, and then I hid.”

  May laughed. Stuart felt a bit irritated. “What did you want anyway?” he asked.

  “To tell you that I can’t be at the museum tomorrow morning. We’ve got to go shopping for school shoes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye, then.” She walked away, and May trailed after her, still complaining about her teeth.

  Stuart watched them go, and then jumped violently as the third triplet suddenly bobbed up from behind the fence.

  “Hi,” she said, grinning. “I was hiding too. Did you like our test?”

  “Not much. But at least I got it right.”

  “Half right. The one with the popsicle was May, but the other one was June. I’m April. You missed a vital clue.”

  “What?” asked Stuart.

  “June isn’t as curious about things as I am. She didn’t ask you all about the mysterious phone call, whereas I would have. It’s about what we say as well as how we say it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe, if you really concentrate, you’ll get all three of us next time.” She leaned her chin on top of the fence and smiled down at him. “So what was the phone call about?”

  “It was, um …” Suddenly he didn’t feel much like telling her; he wanted a bit more time to think about Miss Edie’s offer and what it might mean. Rich with a great big golden capital R…. April wouldn’t spring silly tests on him and then lecture him on the result if he had lots of money. She’d be too busy wondering whether she was going to get a ride in his new car. He imagined the triplets trudging to school in torrential rain while he swooshed by in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s no time to tell you now—it will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Okay.” She said, looking disappointed. “See you then.”

  “See you.”

  “Oh, hang on, Stuart. I had a brainwave about the Fan of Fantasticness. You know we’d decided that it must fold up somehow but we haven’t worked out how?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I remembered that May had this stupid plastic fan she won at a fair last year. When you opened it, it stayed open until you tried to stretch it out a bit more, and then it suddenly sprang shut. It broke after about two tries, but I’ve done a drawing to show you what I mean.”

  She handed a piece of paper over the fence to him.

  “I wondered if Great-Uncle Tony’s fan might work in the same way. But I think it would probably take two of us to try it—the mechanism might be quite stiff after
all this time.”

  “Okay, I’ll give it some thought.” Stuart pocketed the paper, gave her a grown-up sort of nod, and went back into the house. Then an idea occurred to him.

  “Dad, would you like to come to the museum with me tomorrow morning? I can show you how some of the tricks work, and maybe you can help me with one we haven’t solved yet.”

  “A solution that needs lexicographic skill and cerebral—I mean, that needs word knowledge and brain power?”

  Stuart looked up (and up) at the tall, spindly figure of his father, and shook his head.

  “What we need for this one,” he said, grinning, “is muscle.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Fan of Fantasticness looked like a huge, outspread peacock’s tail, each of its “feathers” made of silver metal enameled with greens and blues. Stuart’s father walked around it admiringly.

  “Strictly speaking,” he said, peering over the top of it at Stuart, “there is no such word as fantasticness. Although you’ll find both fantasticalness and fantasticality in The Oxford English Dictionary.”

  “I thought you were going to try to use shorter words, Dad,” said Stuart. “Both of those are even longer than the one I came up with.”

  He unfolded the drawing that April had given him, showing how her sister’s little plastic fan would spring shut if you tried to stretch it wider.

  Then he looked at the actual Fan of Fantasticness. Each “feather” was actually a very long, thin triangle joined to the others only at the bottom. It was obviously designed to fold up. And you could see that when it was folded the triangles would all slide behind one another, with the one in the middle ending up at the front. He also noticed that the one on the far right had a ledge along the length of it. Perfect for putting a foot on and pressing down….

  Stuart gave it a try and felt a slight springiness.

  “Dad,” he said. “Can you come around here? This is where I need a bit of muscle power.”

  His father wandered over.

  “Put your foot on that ledge, next to mine,” said Stuart, “and when I count to three, really, really press down. As if you’re trying to stretch the fan out even wider.”

  “If you’re confident that I won’t contribute to its comminution.”

  “You’re using long words again, Dad.”

  “Sorry. I won’t damage it, will I?”

  “I don’t think so. Now—one, two, three!”

  There was a rusty screech followed by the boing! of a giant spring, and Stuart found himself flying through the air. He had the weird impression that he passed straight through the fan before landing with a thud halfway across the room.

  “Have you sustained any serious contusions?” his father called anxiously, loping across to where Stuart lay.

  “No…. I don’t think so.” Stuart sat up, feeling a bit bruised and dented. One of his shoes had fallen off during the flight.

  “That’s certainly an extraordinarily powerful mechanism,” said his father, helping him to his feet. “One would have thought you’d been expelled from a cannon.”

  They both looked over at the Fan of Fantasticness. It had snapped shut like a Swiss Army knife. From where they were standing, only the central triangle was visible; all the other segments had folded in behind it.

  “From several to single,” remarked his father. “Rather akin to my continuing attempt to move from polysyllabic to monosyllabic speech.”

  Stuart limped across the room to pick up his shoe. Odd bits of loose change from his pockets were scattered across the floor as well as the remains of a pack of mints that he’d forgotten about, and he crawled around collecting them.

  “My goodness,” said his father, peering into the mechanism of the fan. “There’s actually a considerable gap just behind this central segment. I think you may have passed through it during your flight. It’s actually large enough for an individual to interpolate himself into it—indeed, someone shorter than myself standing here would be totally invisible to the audience.”

  Stuart looked up and laughed to see his father’s head poking over the top of the triangle.

  “That must be how they did it,” Stuart said. “Great-Uncle Tony’s assistant would hop into the gap just as the whole thing snapped shut. Everyone would think she’d disappeared.”

  “And there’s an artifact here as well,” remarked his father, crouching down.

  “A what?”

  “A man-made object. One might call it a star—apart from the fact that it only has four extrusions.”

  Stuart’s hand flew to his pocket. The magic star had been in there; it must have fallen out when he shot through the air.

  “And there’s an odd quartet of sulci in the gap where I was standing,” continued his father. “In fact, it looks as if this stellar object might be perfectly congruent with—”

  A terrible realization shot through Stuart, and though he didn’t know what the words sulci or stellar or congruent meant, he somehow knew that his father was about to fit the four-pointed magic star into a matching set of grooves that he’d just found in the Fan of Fantasticness, and he hurled himself across the room, arms outstretched, yelling, “DON’T DO IT, DAD! DON’T FIT THE STAR IN THERE!” and had just managed to snag his father’s sleeve with one hand when there was a soundless explosion, and he was no longer in the museum but in a white, windowless room standing on a blue and purple rug, looking at a painting of a volcano.

  “More magic,” he said, his voice a whisper.

  He looked around. His father was nowhere to be seen. The room was very large; it looked like something out of a stately home, with a massive fireplace, a grand piano in one corner, and three separate doors, all painted different colors. It was full of sunlight, the white walls so bright that they hurt his eyes.

  How can it be full of sunlight when there are no windows? he wondered, and then he looked up, and heard himself shout in surprise.

  There was no ceiling to the room. Above him stretched a clear blue sky. The only visible object was a tall, square tower with a balcony running all around the top of it.

  “Hello!” shouted Stuart. “Anyone around? Dad? Are you here somewhere?”

  There was no answer.

  He walked over to the nearest door and opened it. It led to a concrete cell, bare except for a mattress on the floor and a bucket of dirty water. There was no ceiling on the cell, either. He closed the door again and opened the one next to it. Beyond it lay a long, sunlit corridor with doors opening off both sides. He walked along it and chose a door at random. It opened into a stable, in which an enormous horse was furiously stamping its hooves. It swung its head around and glared at Stuart with fierce reddish eyes, and he quickly closed the door and tried the one opposite. Inside was a room with a trickling stream, instead of a floor, and a set of stepping-stones that split into three paths, each leading to another door. The sun shone overhead, the tall tower casting the only shadow.

  Stuart picked his way across the stepping-stones, and chose the left-hand door. It opened straight onto a blank brick wall. He let the door swing shut again, and stood there, thinking hard.

  “It’s a maze,” he said slowly.

  And then he heard someone high above him call his name.

  Or rather, half his name.

  “Stu—!”

  He looked up, startled.

  Way above him, on the balcony at the top of the tower, stood his father.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Hi, Dad!” yelled Stuart, waving. “Are you all right?”

  Rather hesitantly, his father waved back. “This is most odd,” he called down, his voice faint with distance. “What is this place, and how did I get here?”

  Stuart tried to think of a simple way of explaining the vast and complicated truth, and then decided that he couldn’t. “You’re in a dream,” he yelled. “A very peculiar dream. Can you get down from there?”

  “There’s a steep set of stairs with a door at the base, but the door has a bolt that
is not on my side. I’m stuck here, I think.”

  His father sounded disorientated and a bit wobbly, and Stuart realized that he would have to take charge himself; after all, it was his third magical adventure—he should know something about it by now. “Dad, can you see I’m in a sort of weird maze?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you work out which way I should go? You must have a really good view from up there.”

  There was a pause while his father peered down, moving his head as if following a path. He walked right around the balcony at the top of the tower, disappearing from view for a few seconds, before he reappeared and called down to Stuart.

  “Yes, I think I can see where you should go. You would end up at the foot of this thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “This thing that I’m on. This tall thing.”

  “The tower, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Stuart stared up at him. He couldn’t see his father’s expression from this distance, but it was clear that something was very wrong.

  “Why didn’t you say tower?” he asked.

  “I can’t,” said his father.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I just can’t. It seems that in this dream my mouth won’t say words that have more than one…bit to them.”

  “Bit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean syllable? You can only say one-syllable words?”

  “Yes. yes.“

  His father’s voice was full of frustration, and it occurred to Stuart that it was probably as hard for him to use only short words as it would be for Stuart to use only enormously long ones.

  “Don’t worry,” he yelled reassuringly, “it’s just part of the dream. It shouldn’t be a problem—you just have to say left or right or whatever. Where do I go now?”

  He was still standing on the stepping-stones in the room full of water, with three doors ahead of him.

  His father peered over the balcony. “Go through the door!” he shouted, and then paused to think. “The door that is not on the left or the right.”

  Stuart walked forward and opened the middle door.