The Sixty-Eight Rooms (13 page)

“Kill it! Quick!” Jack yelled.

Suddenly the situation was altogether different. The monstrous creature threatening her best friend now looked as harmless as the roaches kept in the science rooms at school, gross but not dangerous. Even though she never would have touched the roaches at school, she swiftly picked up this miserable bug, dropped it to the floor and stomped her shoe right down on it. A sound that usually made her cringe now signaled victory.

“I’ve always hated cockroaches,” she said, smiling at Jack.

Jack slumped down on the ledge, breathless.

“I hate ’em now!” he said, then added, “Thanks!”

They both rested for a few minutes. Ruthie knew it would be hard to get the picture of the giant hissing cockroach out of her mind even though she knew very well that it was gone for good. But they realized they couldn’t let their guards down—where there was one cockroach there were usually more. Ruthie also had to face the climb back up the fifty-book stairway to continue exploring. Jack just needed a few minutes to catch his breath and calm down. He looked like a dragon slayer who had almost been slain by the dragon!

“Hey, bring some food up here, will ya? Fighting a giant cockroach made me hungry!” he called from the ledge.

“I know, Jack—let’s find one of the dining rooms and pretend we’re rich people eating dinner,” Ruthie suggested after having shrunk again and climbed back up the fifty books, her pockets crammed with snacks, which had shrunk with her.

“I’d rather just eat,” Jack said.

“Okay, here,” she answered, handing him a bag of Goldfish. “I’m going to eat in style, though.” She marched on, poking her head into room E20 as she followed the room numbers backward on the way to E1. E20 was a wood-paneled library that her father would have adored. The next room was a dining room but not the one she wanted.

“Wait up,” Jack called from a few steps behind after having shoved some Goldfish in his mouth. “We have to stay together, Ruthie; there might be more cockroaches running around.”

“C’mon, then.” She motioned him to room E18. They stood in the doorway, where their eyes were nearly blinded by the amount of gold trim on every surface in the room.

“Who would want to live like this?” Jack asked.

Ruthie pointed to a big portrait over the fireplace. “Him,” she answered, knowing that the portrait was of King Louis XIV. “The king of France.”

“You really know everything about these rooms, don’t you?” Jack said.

Ruthie was happy to have impressed him for once. “The only thing I’ve been able to concentrate on all week is the catalogue. Let’s keep going.”

The next room was the bedroom that she had seen last week. She might come back and sleep in that room tonight. She still thought it was one of the prettiest rooms of all.

Room E16 was next; it was the room where Jack had found the candle stand that he’d used to fight the cockroach. It was a dining hall from a French castle.

Jack, still carrying the candle stand, bounded into the room. He set it back where it belonged and plopped down in a chair, putting his feet up on the table, thoroughly at home.

“Let’s eat!” he commanded like a king.

“Okay, okay,” Ruthie agreed, pulling a bag of chips out of her pocket. She sat down at the table, which was long and sturdy and made of intricately carved wood. In fact, nearly everything in the room was made of wood carved in great detail. The walls were stone, and the ceiling was at least twenty feet high. A grand chandelier with tons of candles hung high over their heads.
How did they light all those candles?
she wondered.

“How cool is this? Don’t you wish this was your house?” Jack asked, looking around the room.

Ruthie wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know…. I think it might be scary at night,” she answered.

“If I lived here, I’d have a bunch of big dogs to keep me company all the time. They’d be really good for guarding and hunting. You know, like kings used to have.”

“That would help, I guess,” Ruthie responded, not quite convinced.

There were two enormous windows with many small panes that looked out into a court with a brick castle wall on one side. The court area opened onto a road that led out to a green landscape. It looked as though most of the lower window panes could open individually. Some of them were open, and, like in room E24, Ruthie realized they were hearing birds chirping and could feel the breeze coming into the room.

They were startled by what happened next: off in the distance they heard voices shouting in French. Ruthie and Jack couldn’t understand any of the words but they definitely didn’t sound friendly. The voices combined with other noises—a kind of whirring and dull thuds and metallic clanks.

“What’s that?” Jack exclaimed, jumping to his feet and running to the open window. When he looked out his jaw dropped; some sort of battle was occurring right outside. The whirring sound came from hundreds of arrows flying through the air, shot from bows held by knights in armor. Some arrows hit the ground, while others hit shields. Many of the knights were on horseback, fighting each other with lances and swords, just like in movies. The swords and arrows hitting shields produced violent clanking sounds. Ruthie stood behind Jack at the window. Being in a castle that was under siege felt a little too dangerous as far as she was concerned. As the battle raged, the attacking army pushed the weaker one closer and closer to the castle.

“Duck!” Jack shouted at Ruthie, who was already down on the stone floor. An arrow flew in through the open window and right over their heads, landing across the room on the floor.

“Wow!” Jack said, scrambling on all fours across the slippery floor to pick it up. But as he reached for it, it simply vanished. Once again Jack was speechless.

Although she was pretty scared by this near miss, Ruthie tried to think through what she’d just seen. “That’s so interesting!” she said, still flat on the floor, behind a chair for safety.

“Where did it go? I did see an arrow land in here just now, didn’t I?” Jack asked incredulously.

“I saw it too,” she reassured him. Then another arrow came through the window, narrowly missing Jack. After a few seconds it also evaporated into thin air. “I think you’d better get out of the path of these arrows—they look lethal before they disappear.”

“You’re right,” he said, scooting to a spot behind the big table, out of the line of fire.

They waited on the floor as more arrows flew past the window. “I’ve been wondering, Jack, why no one from the past is ever in these rooms.” Another arrow skidded across the floor and they watched it disappear. “Maybe these people—like Sophie and those soldiers out there—can’t exist in here. That’s why the arrows disappeared. Maybe those soldiers don’t even see this room—or can’t see it.”

“We can find out tomorrow; we can ask Sophie,” Jack suggested. “We’ll figure out if she can see the balconies of room E24 from the park.”

“That’s a good idea, but we’ll have to ask her the right way,” Ruthie said. She went back over the events of the last hour and suddenly realized that she had taken a big chance without knowing it. “One more thing, Jack: when I had the eighteenth-century clothes on, I left the key in my sweatshirt jacket! I was walking around all that time without the key!”

“But I thought you had to keep the key with you at all times.”

“I thought so too, but I guess not,” she answered. “At least not when I’m here in the rooms. Or out there,” she added, pointing out the castle window.

“That must mean the growing and shrinking can’t happen in the rooms,” Jack said.

“That’s gotta be right,” she agreed.

“I wonder,” Jack mused, thinking through the implications of this theory, “if we’re safe from cockroaches in here. Wouldn’t stuff from our time disappear in here unless it was affected by the magic from the key?”

“It’s possible but I’m not sure. We don’t have any proof.” She thought a bit longer. “But what I don’t understand is that pencil. I can’t figure out how it came to be in that room unless someone else has done what we’re doing.” She paused and said, “I think the magic works more like a one-way street; we can enter the past from our
time, but people from the past can’t come to the future. And I don’t think we can relax about the cockroaches yet. We’d need to get something from out there”—she pointed in the direction of the corridor—“something that’s full size, and see what happens when we bring it in here. Something small that we can lift. Like a button or something.” She raised her voice to be heard over the shouts of the battle as it raged on outside the window.

“That would prove your theory,” Jack concurred.

“It would prove my theory,” she said, “but it wouldn’t explain it!”

J
ACK WANTED TO STAY AND
watch the battle outside, but Ruthie persuaded him that it was too dangerous. They had no idea what would happen if they were hit by an arrow, and it wasn’t a risk Ruthie wanted to take. So they headed back out to the corridor and continued on their way to the first room, hoping that they would find some answers there. Ruthie couldn’t resist popping her head into the next room, E15, which was another of her very favorites. It was the most elegant room she’d ever seen, all black and white and silver. Out two balconied windows she could see a nighttime view of the city of London in the 1930s. She imagined herself in this room, a few years older, wearing a beautiful, shimmering dress. But Jack was impatient.

“C’mon!” he urged.

Down the numbers went: E14, E13, E12. That was the room she had visited the first time, the room with the harpsichord and violin. E11, E10, E9, E8—they passed all the other rooms quickly. If Ruthie hadn’t been so curious to find out if room E1 held any secrets she would have lingered in each one.

When they got to room E6 they faced a dilemma that was so obvious they couldn’t understand why they hadn’t noticed it before. Room E6—an English library—was the last room in the corridor. Rooms E1 through E5 were in a continuation of the corridor, across the alcove but with a separate access door. There was an emergency exit in between.

“How are we going to get to room E1?” Ruthie wondered.

“I bet Mr. Bell’s key opens that door too,” Jack stated.

“Probably, but if we go out there full size we’ll set off the motion detectors or be seen by the security cameras,” Ruthie worried.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jack answered.

The two of them stood on the ledge looking at the door as if staring at it would solve the problem. And in fact, it did give Ruthie an idea.

“I’ll have to get big again. You wait up here,” she said, then dropped the key and jumped to the floor as she grew—like she had done before she killed the cockroach. Then she got down on her hands and knees in front of the
door. Ruthie saw space between the bottom of the door and where the carpeted floor started. She wiggled her index finger in the space.

“I think we can squeeze under the door when we’re small. Then we can just go under the other door and get to that part of the corridor. It’s only about four feet. We can go along the baseboards. I bet we’ll be too small to be picked up by the motion detectors.”