Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms Read online

  “It wasn’t mud. It was soot.”

  “All right, why were you covered in soot?”

  “It’s none of your business,” said Stuart, annoyed to learn that Clifford was still following him. He closed the window.

  A few more pebbles smacked against the glass. He opened the window again. “Stop it,” he said.

  April folded her arms and looked at him with her head tilted to one side. Her expression was incredibly irritating, a mixture of condescension and sympathy. “I think you’re in some kind of trouble,” she said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “And I really think you should tell someone about it. Me, preferably, because I’m really good at keeping secrets, and because I’m quite brave, and also because my journalistic contacts—”

  “You don’t have any journalistic contacts,” Stuart said. “You’re ten years old.”

  “My journalistic contacts,” she continued determinedly, “mean that I’m a really useful person to know.”

  “Go away,” said Stuart.

  “And I’m a fast runner,” she added. “And I always win at dares, and my report card said that I never take no for an answer.”

  Stuart started to close the window.

  “And I’m bored!” April shouted. “I’m really, really, really bored. I can’t find any crime to report, and my sisters aren’t interested in investigative journalism. All they want to do is copy stuff out of the paper. Anyway,” she added, “I bet you need help.”

  He hesitated, his hand on the window latch.

  He did need help. Without it he’d never get back into the museum, and he’d never find the safe combination, and he couldn’t give up now, he just couldn’t.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the yard in two minutes.”

  When he got outside, Stuart wished he’d chosen somewhere else to meet. He’d forgotten that April was tall enough to rest her chin on the top of the fence, whereas he could only see over into the yard next door if he stood on tiptoe.

  “So,” said April, looking down at him, “what’s going on?”

  Stuart thought hard. He didn’t really trust her, so it would be best, he decided, to give her as little information as possible, and not to mention the coins or the machines, or even Great-Uncle Tony. He would have to be very, very clever about it.

  “All right,” he said. “If you needed to spend twenty minutes in one of the rooms in Beeton Museum without being disturbed by anyone, how would you do it?”

  “What’s this, a quiz?” asked April, frowning.

  “In a way,” he replied mysteriously.

  “Well, what do you need to do for those twenty minutes?” she asked. “Do you want to borrow something?”

  “No.”

  “Steal something?”

  “No.”

  “Have a go on one of those old-fashioned slot machines in the back room?”

  His jaw dropped. “How do you know?”

  “Everyone wants a go on those. They lock them up when school trips come around. They’ll only work with old threepenny bits. Have you got some?”

  “Er …”

  “I bet you have. Where did you find them?”

  “Er …”

  “Did they belong to your great-uncle Tony who had the house? Did they?”

  Stuart nodded dumbly. It was hopeless. She was just too clever for him.

  “You might as well tell me everything,” said April. “Go on. Please. Please.”

  In a way, it was a relief to be able to tell someone the whole story. April listened carefully, her expression serious, the sunlight bouncing off her spectacles. When he’d finished speaking, she was silent for a very long time, and then she cleared her throat.

  “I don’t believe in magic,” she said.

  “Nor me,” said Stuart. “But then neither did Great-Uncle Tony until the night of the fire.”

  She nodded slowly. “And as a crime reporter,” she said, “I’ve developed an uncanny ability to spot when someone is telling the truth. And I know you’re telling the truth.” She closed her eyes for about three seconds and then opened them again. “Right,” she said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “What, already?”

  “Yup.” She grinned. “Told you I was good.”

  “I haven’t heard the plan yet,” said Stuart coldly.

  “It’s quite simple,” she declared, “and we can do it tomorrow. Tomorrow night. Now, listen …”

  CHAPTER 21

  The next morning Stuart woke quite late. He lay in bed for a while, idly listening to a pigeon cooing outside his window, and then a sudden thought struck him. He scrambled out of bed, and pulled open the curtain. What he saw wasn’t a pigeon, but a white dove—Clifford’s white dove—and it fluttered up from the windowsill and flew in a wide circle above the road, settling at last on the top of a hedge. A hand appeared above the hedge and made a grab for the bird. The dove flew off, leaving a single white tail feather behind.

  Stuart closed the curtain again. He could hear another unusual noise, he realized. It was the sound of his mother’s voice, coming from downstairs. Which meant that she was still at home halfway through the morning, on a weekday.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said, coming into the kitchen a few minutes later. “Are you ill?”

  “No, no.” She smiled breezily. “Just fancied a day off. I wanted a little bit of rest, after the move— organizing all our clothes and shoes and so on, and putting stuff in the attic.”

  “Okay,” he said, not terribly interested.

  “Are you doing anything today?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. Then he remembered the plan. “I mean, yes. Yes I am. You know those girls who came around the other night?”

  She nodded.

  “They invited me over to their house this evening. It’s next door.”

  “Oh, that’s lovely!” said his mother, looking so thrilled you’d think she’d won a million dollars. “What are you going to do there?”

  “One of them’s making a pizza,” said Stuart. “And then we’re going to watch a movie on TV. I’ll be out quite late. Till at least ten o’clock. Is that okay?”

  “Of course it is. It’s the summer,” said his mother. “What’s the film?”

  “It’s about volcanoes.”

  “Shield, cinder cone, or composite?”

  “Don’t know,” said Stuart.

  “Is it cinema vérité, or is there a fictional component?” asked his father.

  “Don’t know that either,” said Stuart. “Anyway, they’ve asked me to come around there at about five.”

  Next door, he knew, April would be telling her parents that she’d been invited to Stuart’s for the evening. The plan was simple and cunning. It might, he thought, actually work.

  The day seemed to pass slowly. Stuart spent most of it lying in front of the television, but every now and again he got up and checked out of the front window. He didn’t actually see Clifford, but a couple of times he spotted the dove, still circling the rooftops.

  Upstairs, his father worked in the study and his mother opened and shut closets and moved things around. Once she popped her head into the living room and asked him if he’d seen his walking boots since moving to Beeton. He hadn’t.

  At last it was ten to five. Stuart stood in the hall and shouted a casual, “Bye, see you later!” up the stairs. He opened the front door, counted to three, and then shut it again, deliberately noisily, before tiptoeing back through the house and into the yard.

  April was waiting on her side of the fence. “There you are,” she said. “Clifford’s definitely still out front, so we’ll have to escape the back way. Take this; you’ll need it.”

  She passed a kitchen stool over the fence to him, and after a moment of irritation, Stuart stood on it and climbed over to her side. There was a piece of rope tied to one leg of the stool, and she hauled it across after him.

  “Where are your sisters?” asked Stuart, glancing a
t the back windows of her house.

  “Printing off the next edition of the Beech Road Guardian,” she said. “Hurry up, can’t you?” She had already placed the stool beside the next fence, and they both climbed over, picking their way through a cluster of plastic gnomes and around a miniature wishing well.

  “Only three more backyards to go,” said April.

  The final fence bordered a small paved alleyway. April tucked the stool behind a garbage can and then tiptoed along to the corner and peered around.

  “He’s still there!” she hissed. “He really is the most useless spy. Anyone with half a brain could outwit him.”

  “Come on!” said Stuart. “The museum closes at six.”

  They ran side by side out of the other end of the alley, and then slowed to a fast walk for the rest of the half-mile to the museum.

  “Right,” said April, stopping dead when they were within sight of the main door. “Repeat the plan to me again.”

  “I don’t need to,” said Stuart. “I know it.”

  “But we should go through it again, step by step.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what makes a good plan into a great plan.”

  “Okay,” said Stuart. “We go in, you start a conversation with the ticket woman so that I can sneak past, I go to the bathroom to open the window, we hide somewhere, we come out when the museum’s closed and everyone’s gone home, we put the coins in the machines, we get out through the open window. Now can we go?”

  “Did you bring a flashlight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you bring a screwdriver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you bring the threepenny bits in a proper wallet, rather than just letting them jingle around in your pocket?”

  “YES.”

  “There’s no need to get cross,” she said brightly, setting off again. Stuart took a deep breath and followed her.

  The first problem was that standing right in the middle of the foyer was the museum curator, Rod Felton. Stuart ducked behind a large shrub outside the entrance and beckoned to April.

  “That’s the one who saw me wreck the horse,” he whispered. “Go and talk to him about Roman ballistics.”

  “About what?”

  “Weapons that throw things,” said Stuart, feeling a bit like his father. “And ask about siege engines.”

  “What are those?”

  “Things for knocking over walls.”

  April nodded and scurried into the museum. Peering from the undergrowth, Stuart could see the electrifying effect of the word ballistics on the curator. A conversation began, Rod Felton waving his arms around and April nodding keenly. She was good at this sort of thing, Stuart had to admit. If only she wasn’t so patronizing and annoying and incredibly, unbearably bossy.

  The curator guided April to the model of the Roman ballista and she started pointing at different parts of it and asking questions, lots of questions. And the woman at the ticket desk was writing down something while talking on the phone.

  Stuart seized his chance. He bent over and ran at a crouch straight through the open doors, past the back of Rod Felton, and into the first room of the museum. Then he straightened up and, pretending to be a normal visitor, followed the signs to the men’s bathroom.

  There he found the second problem. He’d intended to unlatch a window so that April and he could get out of the museum later on, but the only window was quite high up and he couldn’t reach it. Beeton Museum seemed to be full of things that he couldn’t reach.

  Stuart exited the bathrom, heard the words “… could hurl a half-ton boulder more than one hundred yards with the use of twisted sheepskin thongs …” coming around the corner, and dove back in again.

  Immediately, there was a crackling noise and a click. “Beeton Museum will be closing in five minutes,” said a voice from a loudspeaker above his head. “Please make your way to the exit.”

  Stuart peered out of the bathroom again. Visitors trickled past, heading homeward. There was, he noticed, a door marked JANITOR just opposite. He was about to investigate when April sprinted around the corner, spotted him, and gestured frantically for him to follow. They ran past the wartime classroom and the wartime grocery store.

  “Here!” hissed April, swerving at the sign that read AIR-RAID SHELTER and hurrying down two steps into the dark interior. It was a very small shelter, just a curl of corrugated iron, containing a bunk bed and a bench.

  “In there,” whispered April, pointing toward the lower bed. She climbed the ladder to the top bunk, while at the bottom Stuart pulled the blanket over himself and lay as flat as possible. The blanket smelled of wet dog. The mattress was lumpy and slightly damp.

  “Beeton Museum will be closing in one minute,” said the voice on the loudspeaker.

  Stuart counted very slowly to a thousand, trying to breathe through his mouth so as not to have to smell the blanket.

  All was quiet outside the shelter. He was just about to speak when he heard a distant whining noise that grew gradually louder. It was, he realized, an electric floor polisher. Slowly, the noise passed them and faded away.

  Stuart started counting again. When he got to eight thousand, two hundred and ten, he heard a set of footsteps and then a click. All the lights went out. The footsteps went off into the distance.

  Shortly after that, he heard the faraway crash of a heavy door closing, followed by the sound of a car being driven off.

  He pulled the hairy blanket away from his face.

  It was pitch black.

  They were all alone in the museum.

  CHAPTER 22

  Stuart’s flashlight had a wide yellow beam, and April’s a narrow bluish one. As they walked through the darkened “Beeton in Wartime” exhibition, their lights criss-crossed, giving sudden eerie glimpses of a figure in a gas mask or a dummy on a stretcher splotched with fake blood.

  Stuart nearly walked straight into the waist-height model of 1940s Beeton, and as he lurched over it his flashlight swept across the miniature rooftops and gardens, lighting up something very odd, something that he hadn’t noticed before.

  “Hey, look—” he started to say, and then he realized that April was hurtling ahead into the next room, flashlight beam bouncing. He hurried after her, past the horse (now back on four legs, with both ears restored), and into the final room.

  “Right,” she said, ducking under the rope that cordoned off the coin machines. “Which first?” She shined her flashlight between the bicycle tire repair-kit machine and the try-your-strength one.

  “The bicycle tire repair machine,” he said, fishing in his pocket for the screwdriver.

  April watched impatiently as Stuart got to work on the first screw. “Was that a car?” she asked suddenly, cocking her head.

  “Didn’t hear anything,” said Stuart, concentrating hard.

  “I hope it wasn’t.” She sounded anxious. “What if somebody saw our flashlights through the windows? Did you open the one in the bathroom, incidentally?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. He was tired of admitting that he was too short to do things. “Didn’t have time,” he lied.

  “What do you mean? You had ages. You had all that time when I was being lectured on those stupid Roman throwing things.”

  “Yes, but it was complicated.”

  “What was complicated? How are we going to get out? What if we’re stuck in here for the night?”

  “Look,” he said, feeling exasperated. For all her cleverness, April was an awful worrier. “I’m trying to unscrew this. Why don’t you put the money in the fairground machine?”

  “Oh, can I?” She sounded thrilled.

  “Just to start it up,” he said quickly. “I’ll do the hammer thing.”

  “Okay.”

  He took a threepence out of his other pocket and handed it to her, and then with a couple of twists finished taking out the first screw. “Done it yet?” he asked, star
ting on the next.

  “No … not quite. It won’t go in.”

  “Give it a real shove,” he said. “I’ve had to do that on some of the other machines.”

  The second screw came out quite easily, and the metal strip that covered the coin slot fell to the floor with a tinkle. Stuart pushed a threepence into the slot and pressed a button. There was a metallic clank and a small object landed in the compartment at the bottom. It was oblong, and no wider than his hand. He shoved it, unopened, into his jacket pocket.

  “You ready?” he asked, straightening up and shining the flashlight in April’s direction. She was crouched over the try-your-strength machine, tugging at something.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “What do you mean?” Stuart shifted the beam of light so that it lit up her hands. Between her fingers, he could see half the threepence sticking out of the slot.

  “It’s the wrong one,” she said.

  Stuart leaned over. There were two slots next to each other on the front of the machine. One looked large enough for a threepenny bit. April, for some reason, had stuck the coin into the other, narrower one, meant for sixpences, and it had wedged there.

  “Why on earth did you do that?” he asked sharply. He pushed her hands aside and tried to wiggle the coin. It had jammed fast. He inserted the flat end of the screwdriver beside the threepence and moved it around, and the slot started to cave inward. He tugged the coin again and this time it came out.

  He held it up and stared at it in the blue flashlight beam. “It’s bent,” he said accusingly. “You’ve bent it. It’s ruined.”

  April said something, but in a voice so muffled that he couldn’t hear the words.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “My stupid eyes,” she said. “I can’t see very well in the dark even with glasses, and the flashlight makes them go all dazzly. I didn’t notice the second slot until it was too late. Stupid eyes. Stupid glasses. Stupid, stupid glasses.”

  He heard her swallow a couple of times and knew that she was trying not to cry. He felt furious, not only with April but also with himself—he’d told her to give the coin a real shove, and that’s what she’d done. And then he’d blamed her. It took him a moment or two before he could bring himself to speak.