The Sixty-Eight Rooms (16 page)

She gazed at the view out the window for any signs of life. The windows were closed, so she couldn’t feel a breeze or hear any outdoor sounds—although what she saw looked real—and there was no obvious exit from this room into the landscape.

Then she went back to the cabinet. For some reason she had a feeling that there was something in there. It was dark in the cabinet, but as her eyes adjusted she saw an object that she hadn’t noticed before, shoved back in the corner. It appeared to be a metal drinking mug. She pulled it out to get a better look, turning it over to see if there were any marks on the bottom (something Mrs. McVittie had taught her to do with antiques). Onto the stone floor spilled a pink plastic hair barrette.

On hearing the plastic hit the floor, Jack looked over at her.

“I know Mrs. Thorne didn’t mean for this to be in this room!” she exclaimed as she picked it up off the floor.

“This is getting weirder and weirder,” Jack stated. “Isn’t that the kind of barrette a little girl would wear?”

“Yeah,” Ruthie answered. “It’s like the pencil—it just doesn’t belong here.” She looked at the bottom of the mug again. “And this mug doesn’t seem right for this room either. I don’t think the marks on the bottom are from England.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mrs. McVittie once showed me that antique silver has special markings on the bottom so you can tell who made it and what country it came from. She said English stuff always has a lion on the bottom. And this is definitely supposed to be an English room.”

“Yeah, but somebody probably just mixed it up. You know, maybe they were cleaning the rooms and took this out and then forgot where to put it.”

“But how do you explain the barrette?”

Jack paused. “I don’t. I can’t.”

Ruthie couldn’t stop looking at the mug. It looked so familiar for some reason.

“I know where this mug belongs!” she exclaimed as soon as it came to her.

“Where?”

“It’s from one of the American rooms! We can check in the catalogue but I’m pretty sure I’m right. We’ve got to
go look. Maybe we’ll find clues about how this barrette ended up in here.”

Ruthie was so excited; she was certain she knew which room the mug belonged in and she was about to run back out into the corridor when she stopped in her tracks. She turned around and walked to the glass viewing window.

“Uh-oh,” Ruthie said. Jack turned and followed her gaze.

Gallery 11 was set up so that the European rooms—the ones they had already entered—were installed around the outer wall, with the corridor running behind them. The American rooms were installed in a center island and had their own access corridor behind them, but the two corridors were not connected. And those rooms were some of Ruthie’s favorites: an early American kitchen with tiny children’s toys on the floor, rooms from New York City, rooms from the Revolutionary and Civil wars, even a Wild West room fit for a real cowboy.

“That’s been bothering me too, Ruthie,” Jack said. “I guess we’re going to have to squeeze under that access door too.”

“We’ll get small and run across the viewing space. We didn’t set off the detectors when we came to this part of the corridor, right?”

“Right,” Jack agreed. “But once we’re over there, you know you’ll have to do the reverse bungee jump again.” He looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “I mean, unless
we find something we can use to make a staircase so we can both be in the rooms at the same time.”

“Ugh.” Ruthie cringed at the thought. “Why don’t we get into that corridor and see what’s there first?” She really wanted to avoid that whiplash-inducing jump.

“Okay. Let’s do it.” Jack headed out of room E1.

Ruthie took one last, long look around Christina’s room (that was how she thought of it now) before she went back out to the ledge. She put the mug and the barrette in the deep pocket of her sweatshirt jacket. Jumping was the only way down, and Ruthie knew that if she could do it, Jack certainly could. He didn’t hesitate; he grabbed hold of her hand and she tossed Christina’s key to the floor.

“Don’t forget your phone,” Jack reminded Ruthie once they were full size again. She stuffed it in her pocket. He grabbed the piece of nylon cord and picked the key up off the ground. At the door they shrank back down to five inches, flattened themselves into the blue-and-tan-flecked carpet and found themselves once again in the alcove.

This time, instead of heading straight across to the other access door, they turned to the right and looked at the huge expanse in front of them. The gallery was dark; only the dim red emergency exit lights and the glow from the rooms far above their heads lit their way.

“Wow,” Jack said. “This looks gigantic!”

“We probably shouldn’t run too close to each other,” Ruthie suggested, even though she wanted to stay right
next to him. “We’ll be less likely to be picked up by the motion detectors.”

“Good idea. Ready?” Jack asked.

“Ready. You go first.” She didn’t even need to say that—Jack was already bounding across the lumps of carpet. She followed after a good interval. The actual space to cross was probably about fifteen feet. To them it felt like a football field.

At the door, Jack threw himself down to the floor, ready to roll right under. But he didn’t. Ruthie got to the door just after he did and saw what was stopping him: there was no gap between the bottom of the door and the carpet. Jack tried to shove one leg under.

“It’s no use. It’s too tight!” he said.

“Are you sure?” Ruthie asked, moving down the door a bit to see if there might be more space at another spot. She could barely get the toes of her shoes under.

“Ugh!” she said in frustration.

“Yeah, and the last thing we want is to get stuck under the door!” Jack added. “Might as well go back.”

He was right; they obviously couldn’t get into the corridor under this door. Jack went across the empty dark space first, a little slower this time. Ruthie followed.

“Why couldn’t it be as easy as this?” she said, slipping under the door to the access corridor for the European rooms. Once inside, they both stood leaning against the door, out of breath from their long jog, looking at the
vast corridor. Their dilemma seemed as big as the space surrounding them.

“Hmmm … I wonder …” Jack was looking up at something far down the corridor, near the ceiling. “I think I might have an idea.” He sounded full of optimism. “I think we need to be big again.” He was beginning to walk toward the book staircase.

“Why? What are you looking for?”

“I remember seeing an opening for an air duct—you know, for the heating and air-conditioning. I noticed it before but didn’t think about it. I bet it goes through the ceiling beams across to the American rooms. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. If we can get up there, we could crawl through and come out on the American side!”

Ruthie was skeptical but she didn’t say anything, having no better plan herself.

“Ready to get big?” Ruthie asked.

Jack nodded and put his hand out for her. Ruthie dropped the key to the floor and they returned to the staircase full size. While Jack was looking up toward the ceiling, Ruthie opened the catalogue on top of the staircase and started flipping through it.

“How do you feel, Jack?”

“Fine. Why?”

“I don’t know; I was just kinda wondering if we’d start feeling sore or weird after all the shrinking and expanding. But I don’t feel anything strange—not since the very first time, when my muscles felt a little sore.”

“Yeah, me too. I guess it’s a really good potion,” he answered, like some kind of expert on magic.

“Look,” she said, pointing to something in the catalogue. She showed him a photo of a room that had mugs identical to the one they had found in room E1. “This must be where it belongs, room A1. Now we really have to get over to the other side!”

As Ruthie looked at the book, Jack was looking up, contemplating the vent that led to the air duct. It was about ten inches tall by two feet wide but it was out of reach.

“I was afraid of that,” Jack said, mulling over the problem. “Even if we could reach it we can’t squeeze through when we’re full size. I could stand on something and put the shrunken you up there. But what would you do on the other side to get down?”

Ruthie began to ponder the options too. “I can jump as I expand, like we did before. It’s pretty high, but I bet I could do it. But what about you? You’d be stuck over here again, full size.” Ruthie had no intention of leaving Jack out of this expedition.

“Got any better ideas?”

“We definitely don’t have enough books to build a staircase that high,” Ruthie estimated. “But maybe …” She was picturing something in her head. She ran down the corridor toward the area where she’d found the boxes of books. She scanned the other items available to them: one more catalogue box, a broom, a mop, a large bucket,
a few miscellaneous tools, a roll of duct tape. She thought for a minute. Then she grabbed the duct tape and the bucket and hurried back to Jack, looking very pleased with herself.

“I bet this will work,” she said, holding up the two items. “I don’t get it. How?”

“You’ll see.” Ruthie placed the bucket upside down on the floor and stood on it. Now, if she stood on tiptoe, the vent was just within reach. As Jack watched, Ruthie fashioned a duct tape climbing strip: three floor-to-vent lengths of tape stuck to the wall, the middle one having the sticky side facing out, the other two holding it in place. She turned and beamed. “Are you ready to go wall climbing?”

“Cool! Do you think it will hold us?”

“I hope so … or it could be too sticky and we won’t be able to move at all,” she said, even though she felt pretty confident her invention would work. “Once we get to the opening on the other side, we can jump as we grow back to full size. Also, we’ll need the bucket and duct tape to shrink with us so that we can do this again when we’re ready to come back. Otherwise we’ll be stranded.”

“Let’s give it a try!” Jack said. He held the bucket and the duct tape in his right hand and grabbed Ruthie’s hand with his left, letting the key fall into her palm as he did so. They immediately returned to their miniature selves.

Jack went first. It took a little practice to get the hang
of it. Having to climb with the bucket over one arm proved challenging for Jack. The bucket kept sticking to the tape. He found that if he kept it high, around his shoulder, it worked better. It was also important to keep three limbs touching the tape at all times. He had to proceed very methodically and make one move at a time: right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot, and on and on.

“This is awesome! I feel just like Spider-Man!” He smiled down at her. “It’s easy!”

Once he was a little way up the tape, she started. The sensation was like nothing she had ever experienced. Their class had gone rock-wall climbing the year before for an end-of-year field trip. But for that she’d been harnessed to ropes and pulleys and there were all kinds of knobs to hold on to. Now she was without a safety rope, firmly pressing her palms and feet onto a surface sticky enough to hold her entire weight. She noted the sound it made as she pulled her hands off the tape, like pulling the backing off giant stickers.

“Whoa!” Jack yelled suddenly. Ruthie looked up to see that he had temporarily lost control. The bucket had gotten stuck to the tape again and he had pulled on it a bit too forcefully. That caused a foot to come off the tape, and he found himself hanging by only one hand and one foot. He was struggling to keep hold of the bucket and not come completely unstuck.

“Careful, Jack!” Ruthie said. He finally recovered, though, and pressed his foot back onto the tape.

Soon the five-inch-tall duo found themselves scaling the wall like a pair of four-legged spiders racing to the top. In their miniaturized state they were so light that they hardly pulled on the strip of tape at all. The trickiest part was the slight jog the tape made when it came to the ledge; they had to climb at an incline—almost upside down—until the tape passed over the protrusion. But the stickiness of the tape held them well. Ruthie realized as she approached the top that looking down was definitely not a good idea—the height and the boundless space around her were truly dizzying. Her stomach clenched. She had to use all of her mental powers and determination to keep herself from panicking.

When they reached the top, Ruthie plopped herself down onto the floor of the air duct, feeling as if she had scaled a mountain. Inside the duct, they saw the long horizontal expanse ahead of them disappear in darkness; it was darker than pitch-black.

“Semper paratus!”
Jack declared, pulling a flashlight out of one of the many pockets of his cargo pants.

“What?”

“It means ‘always prepared,’ I think. It’s Latin.”

“How do you know that?” she said, in awe of his word knowledge and—more importantly—his having the flashlight handy.

“How
I know it is something I don’t know.” And he
obviously didn’t care—he was already plunging into the darkness, guided by the thin but reassuring beam from the flashlight. “C’mon!”

Ruthie was once again thankful Jack was with her, because she felt far from courageous at the moment. Even though she knew they were above the viewing room, she felt as though she were entering a deep, deep tunnel. But Jack led the way and she stayed close to him. Finally she spied a faint light at the end, the familiar glow from the room installations on the other side.