Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms (3 page)

The back door was large and solid and firmly locked. Stuart rattled at the handle for a while, and then knelt down to look through the keyhole. There was nothing to see but darkness. Disappointed, he straightened up. There was obviously no way of getting into Great-Uncle Tony’s house. The excitement of the past few minutes seemed to dribble away, leaving him feeling flatter and sadder than ever. Without bothering to try any more windows, he carried on walking around the house, kicking at the litter in the grass.

As he reached the front yard again, his toe caught an empty plastic bottle and sent it sailing up and over the front wall. It bounced across the road and came to rest against the front wheel of a bicycle. A pink bicycle. A pink bicycle that was parked right next to his own. Standing beside it was the girl from next door. Glittery clips. Clever expression. She was holding a camera with a very long lens.

As Stuart gaped at her, she raised the camera and took a photo of him. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

She said nothing, but took another photo.

“Stop it!” he shouted.

The camera flashed again. “Anything to say to our readers?” the girl called, taking yet another picture. “Any comments as to why you’re trespassing on private property?”

She was obviously nuts. The camera flashed once more.

Stuart turned and sprinted back around the house. Was there another way out? The wooden fence surrounding the yard was high, with no footholds, but right at the back, wedged into one corner, was an old barbecue grill, its white enamel lid blotched with rust. If he climbed up on that, he could probably get over into the next yard. Of course, he actually had to
get
to it first, without being first stung to death or shredded by thorns.

He looked across the sea of weeds. Just visible were odd little islands—discarded bits of furniture, an old trunk, a pile of boxes—which he could use as stepping-stones. He held his arms above his head, to guard against stinging nettles, and took a first, hesitant step onto a rotting armchair, its cushions furred with mold. From there he jumped onto a mushy pyramid of cardboard boxes and balanced briefly on what looked like an old gas meter before taking a huge step onto the lid of the trunk. The grill was only a couple of feet away now. But ahead of him there were no more stepping-stones, only a stretch of particularly lethal-looking nettles. He looked around quickly. There was no sign of the girl.

What he needed was a bridge. He retraced his steps and had just started to gather up some of the soggy boxes when he heard a beeping noise.

“Following subject into backyard of trespassed property,” came the girl’s voice from around the corner.

Stuart leaped from gas meter to trunk and started to lob the boxes ahead of him, stepping into one before placing the next. It took him four boxes to reach the grill, and then it was a simple job to scramble onto it and then up and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. He had no time to look where he was jumping.

In some ways he was lucky. He could have ended up in a pond, or gone through the roof of a greenhouse. Instead he landed up to his ankles in a compost heap. He climbed out and shook tea leaves and slimy bits of orange peel from his shoes.

A startled face looked through a window at him. Stuart waved cheerily and sprinted up the neat yard and along the side of the house, emerging onto the sidewalk.

His plan had worked! All he had to do now was go around the block and stand watch until that awful girl went away on her bike. He walked up the road and turned right onto a street full of small shops. And stopped dead.

The girl was standing directly in front of him. Her face lit up. “Subject has just appeared on Main Street,” she said into a walkie-talkie.

Stuart turned tail and began to run, but there were too many people on the sidewalk to allow a quick getaway. Instead he dodged into a post office and hid behind the door. The girl followed. As soon as she had her back to him, he hurried out onto the street again. And immediately he saw
the same girl
—glittery clips and clever expression—coming along the sidewalk toward him holding a walkie-talkie. For a moment Stuart thought he’d gone mad, totally mad, and then the words “identical twins” floated across his mind, and he realized that this second girl (unlike the first) was carrying a large, purple notepad.

She hadn’t seen him yet.

He thought quickly. There was an old-fashioned telephone booth just outside the post office, and he pulled open the door and stepped inside.

It smelled repulsive. The floor was covered with mashed cigarette butts and horrible stains, and the windowpanes were encrusted with filth. The door closed softly behind him, and he crouched down to peer through one of the few clear patches in the glass. The second girl had now been joined by the first. They were standing together, scanning the sidewalks, searching for him.

All at once, he felt like an idiot.
Two girls
, he thought.
Here I am, in a stinking phone booth, and I’m hiding from two girls. I should just go out there and tell them to
—. And then, with sudden disbelief, he leaned forward and pressed his nose against the window. The two girls had been joined by a third, and they all looked
exactly
the same.

Identical
triplets
. He was being hunted by identical triplets. Stuart decided to stay put for a while.

A loud knocking made him jump, and he straightened up and turned. A woman was thumping on the door with the handle of her umbrella. “Are you making a call?” she shouted.

“Yes,” he lied.

“Because there’s a line, you know!”

Stuart felt around in his pockets for some money. He could always phone his father, he thought. After all, he’d been away for a bit longer than half an hour. His fingers found a single coin and pulled it out. It was the worthless threepenny bit. He turned it over in his hand a couple of times.

“Hurry up!” shouted the woman. “Either make a call or give someone else a chance.”

“All right, all right,” said Stuart. He lifted the receiver and stuck the coin in the slot, fully expecting it to jam halfway, but it clattered into the box. Now he had to remember his new telephone number. He paused, fingers hovering over the buttons. 0-2, was it? And then 0 … 3 … 4 …

He felt something brush his leg, and he looked down to see the telephone cord. It was hanging uselessly from the receiver, wires sticking out of the dangling end. Some previous visitor must have wrenched it right off.

“It’s been vandalized,” he called to the woman, holding up the end of the cable so that she could see it. She shook her head in disgust and walked off.

Stuart put the receiver back on the cradle and jabbed the
RETURN MONEY
button a few times, but nothing happened.

He crouched down to look through the window at the triplets, and spotted them scurrying away in a tight little group.

Time to go
, he thought.

And then the phone rang.

CHAPTER 4

It was impossible, of course. Stuart stared at the receiver, and then at the dangling cord. It swayed gently, the severed end nearly brushing the floor. And yet the phone was ringing.

Slowly, terribly slowly, he lifted the receiver.

“Hullo?” he said weakly.

“Is that a Mister Horten?”

“Yes,” answered Stuart, so feebly that he could hardly hear his own voice.

“This is Beeton Public Library. We have the book.”

“The what?”

“The book of photographs that you requested. It’s in very poor condition, I’m afraid, so we can’t allow you to take it off the premises. However, if you come to the information desk we’ll let you study it. We’re open between ten and five-thirty, Monday to Saturday.”

“Thank you,” said Stuart automatically, his voice a pathetic little croak.

The line went dead.

He rode home in a daze, and it wasn’t until he had finished lunch that he managed to speak a single word, apart from “Yes,” “No,” or “Can I have ketchup with this?”

“Dad?” he said.

“Hmmmm?” His father raised his eyes from the book he was poring over. The book was actually volume seven of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, which covered words from
Hat
to
Intervacuum
.

“Could an electrical short make a phone ring even when the wire’s cut?”

“Scientific phenomena would be more your mother’s area,” said his father. “However, I believe that given certain prevailing atmospheric conditions it would not be beyond the bounds of probability.”

“Okay,” said Stuart. “So that’s a maybe. And … Dad?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Do you know where the library is in Beeton?”

“The library? It’s ten minutes’ walk from here.”

“Can we go there this afternoon?”

His father, who had gone back to reading the dictionary, looked up again with a pleased expression. “Indubitably,” he said.

“I bet that means yes,” said Stuart.

There were two parts to the library. The old part had little turrets on the outside and a tiled entrance hall with a marble statue of a man reading a book, and the modern part had a glass staircase going up the middle and an enormous sculpture of a banana made out of wire.

“I’ll just go and look at the children’s section,” said Stuart to his dad as they walked in together.

His father smiled and nodded. Actually Stuart could have said, “I’ll just hang upside down from the wire banana and throw bags of flour at the librarians,” and his father would still have smiled and nodded. Libraries sent him into a sort of trance, and he wandered off in the general direction of reference books. Stuart watched him go, and then went to find the information desk.

It was in the older part of the building, and the man behind the counter was quite old, too. He had long white hair, a rather severe expression, and glasses that hung on a chain around his neck. He was checking something in a card file, and he didn’t look up or show any sign that he’d seen Stuart.

A minute ticked away, and then another. Stuart could feel his heart thudding.

“Can I help you?” asked the man suddenly.

Stuart swallowed. “My name’s Horten,” he said. “You called me about a book.”

“Oh, so
you’re
Mr. Horten,” said the man, looking surprised. “Well, I must admit I expected someone older. Still, it’s very pleasing to find a youngster interested in local history. I have the book here. Fascinating little volume—it was published in nineteen twenty-three, you know.”

From behind the desk he took out a tiny paperback with a faded pink cover and a cracked spine. It had very few pages.

“I ask you to take the utmost care when you study it,” said the man. “It’s our only copy and the binding is very fragile. No tracing or photocopying.”

Stuart nodded.

“And you’ll need to wear these, so as not to mark the pages.” He held out a pair of white gloves, and Stuart took them, dubiously. “Oh, and could you sign this?” added the man. He slid a form across the desk. Paper-clipped to the top of it was a request slip. It was creased and yellowish. The name written on it in penciled capitals was
HORTEN
.

“My colleague found the card wedged right at the bottom of a drawer,” the man told him. “It was under a whole pile of stuff, and I rang the number just on the off chance. If you hadn’t answered, I’d have thrown it away. I was meaning to ask how long ago you requested it.”

“Ages ago,” said Stuart, the back of his neck feeling rather cold. “So long ago that I can’t even remember doing it.”

He took the book and sat down. It was called
Modern Beeton: A Photographic Record
, and on each of the eight double pages there was a snapshot of the town.

The first picture was of Main Street. There was one car (looking like a shoe box on wheels), two horse-and-buggies, three bicycles, and lots of men in hats and women wearing gloves and narrow skirts. At the front of the picture, partly cut off by the frame, was a telephone booth.

Stuart peered at it. Not a telephone booth, he thought;
the
telephone booth—the very one in which he’d received the call. And there was someone in it. A small boy, his nose squashed up against the glass so that he looked like a pig.
The hustle-bustle of busy Main Street
, read the caption.