Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (10 page)
The first match folded limply in half when he struck it, but the second produced a tiny, bluish flame. Holding his breath, Stuart held it to the wick. A clear yellow light grew and steadied. Cupping a hand around the flame, he closed the back door again and began to explore.
There were two doors out of the kitchen. The first led to a small cellar, festooned with cobwebs and empty except for a pile of coal. The second door opened into a passageway. Stuart walked along it cautiously, the candle flame dancing.
Through an arch to the left was a dining room, the table covered with what looked like a gray furry cloth. Stuart touched it, and his finger sunk to the knuckle. It wasn’t a cloth, but a layer of dust as thick as a rug. He continued along the passage and through another arch into a long living room, the walls glinting with framed pictures, the furniture as dusty as the table had been.
He paused beside one of the pictures. It was a theater poster for the Nottingham Hippodrome, and at the top of the list of acts was Great-Uncle Tony’s name, accompanied by a small black-and-white photograph. As Stuart peered up at his great-uncle’s face—like a sparkier version of his own father’s—the candle flame began to flicker wildly, and he realized that there was a draft swirling around his knees. He took a step back and saw a broad, empty fireplace, almost invisible in the shadows. He shielded the flame and moved on into the front hall.
In the trembling yellow light, Stuart explored room after room. In the downstairs study, he found a family of mice nesting in the ruined seat of a chair. In the bathroom he disturbed a bat, which flew in worried loops around his head. In one of the upstairs bedrooms he found a wardrobe full of moths and a drawer heaving with beetles.
At every turn, he expected to stumble upon something significant, but all he could find was wildlife. Admittedly, the beetles were fascinating, scrambling over one another as they panicked in the candlelight. Stuart stood staring at them for at least a minute before realizing that a low noise coming from outside the house was getting louder.
It was a truck, backing up. And there were shouts too, and boots on the pavement and the whine of the gate hinge. He went over to the window and tried to peer through a slit between the boards, but before he could see anything at all he heard a regular
thud, thud, thud
and realized that someone was climbing up the ladder onto the scaffolding.
And from downstairs, he could hear a ripping, tearing noise, as someone else started to pull the planks away from the front door.
Stuart blew out the candle and ran for it.
Stuart hurtled down the stairs, just as sunlight flooded through the newly uncovered stained glass of the front door, illuminating the jaunty hat and wand and the letters
T-T TH
. The living room was still in darkness, and as he tried to hurry he found himself kicking a footstool halfway across the room. The crash sounded enormous, but by now there seemed to be crashes coming from all sides of the house.
He carried on groping his way toward the kitchen, but before he got there he heard a different sort of noise: quieter but distinct. It was the sound of the back door being opened.
“Here, it’s not locked,” said a man’s voice, surprised.
Stuart stood paralyzed. If he was caught, he’d get into trouble. The builders might even tell the police, but they’d definitely, definitely tell his parents. If his mom and dad found out that he’d been trespassing on condemned property at seven in the morning, then they wouldn’t trust him to go off by himself at all, and then that would be that—the whole quest smashed, the trail frozen. The threepences would rust unused, while somewhere in Beeton, Great-Uncle Tony’s workshop would remain forever undiscovered.
Stuart could hear footsteps crossing the kitchen.
Was there anywhere he could hide? He looked around frantically, squinting in the darkness. Except that it wasn’t darkness any longer. Another of the boards covering the front window was at that very moment being wrenched free and an arrow of light shot across the room, bouncing off the framed picture that he’d looked at earlier. And all of a sudden, he knew where he could go.
He scurried over to the fireplace, ducked down, and crawled into it. It was larger than it looked. He could feel the draft stirring the air around him and he realized that if he stood at the back with his head and body actually up the chimney, then only his legs below the knee would be seen from the room, and since his jeans and sneakers were black, he’d be nearly invisible.
He got in as far as he could and then stood upright. With a painful thud, his head hit something hard.
“Start in the upstairs bathroom,” said the voice coming along the passageway. “Get the tub out and then strip the piping. It’s all copper.”
Stuart ducked back down again, clutching his head. He could already feel a lump pushing up under his fingers. He half rose again, extended the other arm and felt around inside the chimney. He could feel the corners of a metal box. He gave it a shove, but it didn’t move; one side of it seemed to be fixed to the brickwork. He stood up as much as he was able, his head crooked awkwardly to one side.
The clump of boots approached the fireplace.
“Any of the furnishings worth anything?” asked a second voice.
“A dealer came around and said he had a client for the big items. The rest is just trash.”
The boots retreated again, and in a few moments Stuart heard the drumbeat of footsteps going up the stairs. In the living room all was momentarily quiet.
He took his chance. He crawled out from the fireplace and was about to make a dash for the back door, when the throbbing in his head seemed to push a thought into his brain.
A metal box.
A metal box fixed to the front of the chimney.
He stepped back to the fireplace and looked at the framed poster that hung above it.
The photograph of Great-Uncle Tony seemed to stare at him. Stuart gripped the bottom of the frame with one hand and lifted it up. There, behind the picture, was the closed door of a small safe inset into the chimney, firmly cemented into place. It had a little dial on the front, with the numbers one to twenty-nine printed around it. And beneath the dial were the words:
THE MINI HERCULES HOME SAFE
MANUFACTURED BY
HORTEN’S MIRACULOUS MECHANISMS
Stuart had seen safecracking done in films. He turned the wheel, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise again. Nothing happened: no clicks, no clacks, no hidden springs. And he knew from films that nothing
would
happen unless he had exactly the right three-number combination.
He was just about to have another go when he heard footsteps coming back down the stairs, and he hastily lowered the picture and ran for the kitchen. The back door was still open so he galloped out and across the backyard, using the junk stepping stones that he’d first used only a week ago. As he vaulted from the old grill over the fence and into the neighbor’s compost heap, someone shouted, “Hey, you!” but by that time Stuart knew he was safe.
It wasn’t until he reached his bicycle that he realized that he’d left his great-uncle’s back-door key sticking out of the lock.
And it wasn’t until he arrived home and saw April Kingley looking out of the upstairs window of her house, the sun flashing off her glasses, and then saw her mouth drop open with shock, that he realized that he wasn’t looking quite the same as when he’d left the house. The bathroom mirror confirmed it. He was completely coated with soot, and it took half an hour and most of his mother’s Fruit ’n’ Herb X-plozion shower gel, before he was acceptably clean again.
“That’s a pleasant odor, if a trifle pungent,” said his father, over a late breakfast. “Quince and tarragon?”
“Strawberry ’n’ mint,” said Stuart, between mouthfuls of cereal. “Dad, say you were a safecracker, and there was a safe with the numbers one to twenty-nine on the dial, and you didn’t know the right combination. How long would it take you to try all of them?”
“Ah, a problem in probability,” said his father. “Mathematical conundrums would be more your mother’s area, I feel, but I seem to remember from my hours in the classroom that the number of combinations would be twenty-nine to the power of three.”
“So that’s twenty-nine times twenty-nine times twenty-nine,” said Stuart. There was a pause while he fetched a calculator and tapped in the sum. “Twenty-four thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine possible combinations,” he said, horrified.
Trying them all would be impossible, even if he actually managed to get back into the house again. No, his next task was obviously to find the correct three numbers.
Somehow.
His father crunched a piece of toast. “Do you have any plans for the matutinal hours?” he asked. “By which I mean, of, or related to, or occurring in the morning.”
Stuart nodded. “Yes, I have. I’m going to …”
His voice tailed away as he looked at his dad. His father had such a nice face—never suspicious, never angry, never more than pleasantly puzzled—and Stuart was beginning to feel really bad about how many lies he’d told him over the last few days. On the other hand, if he said,
Yes, I have. I’m going to meet the blind sister of your missing uncle’s fiancée in a bingo hall,
it wouldn’t sound remotely believable.
“I’m going to go on another bike ride,” he said.
He reached the Gala Bingo Hall at ten to eleven. There was a sign on the sidewalk outside that read
EARLY-BIRD SENIOR-CITIZEN SESSION 11 A.M.
The doors were already open, and the foyer was heaving with old ladies. Stuart tried to edge in discreetly, but they all seemed very pleased to see him.
“Hello, young man. Here with Granny, are you?”
“Nice to see a young face. Eight, are you? Or seven, maybe?”
He looked around for Leonora, but all he could see was a wall of sensible coats. It occurred to him that he might as well try to do some research while he was waiting, so he smiled back at one of the women and asked if she remembered the Gala when it was a movie theater.
“Ooh, yes,” she said. “Doing a school project, are you?”
“Mmm,” said Stuart.
“Oh, it was lovely then,” she continued. “A maitre d’ at the door, all dressed in red and gold—he’d salute you when you went in—and a great big fish tank in the middle of the foyer.” She turned to her friend. “Lorna, this young fellow wants to know if we remember this place when it was a movie theater.”
“Remember it?” said Lorna, who was all dressed in blue, including her shoes and glasses. “We practically used to live here, didn’t we, Vi?”
“Lived here,” confirmed Vi. “Saw every film they ever showed. We used to sit in the balcony, and I always had a strawberry cone and you always had a bag of toffees.”
“Oh, those toffees,” said Lorna, “I’d forgotten about those. There was a machine just by the ticket office, wasn’t there? You put in threepence and you got a little bag full. Always exactly the same number of toffees.”
“Baker’s dozen,” said Vi.