The Game of Sunken Places Read online

  “Watch me,” said Gregory.

  She slammed the door shut, up above.

  They made their way to the bathing machine. Curling their fingers around the door, they yanked it open again. There was the stuffed grouse.

  Carefully, Brian lifted it and hoisted it out. He laid it on a crate of china. He recited, “Bird of the air, I answer the gust. With a long, sorrowed groan, I go where I must.”

  Gregory lifted up the grouse. He looked at the underside. He ran his thumbs along the wood, looking for buttons or catches.

  “No groaning,” he said. He rattled the grouse. “Not much going, either.”

  Brian looked glum. “It was an idea,” he said, shrugging.

  “And a good one, too,” said Gregory. “Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  They sighed and looked around the stacks of mess.

  “Well?” whispered Gregory.

  “We don’t know what we’re looking for, exactly,” said Brian. “Just keep thinking of the riddle.”

  For ten minutes or so, they shifted crates. They found a dress with a bustle, to make a woman’s rear look bigger. They found old long johns. They examined stacks of grimy dinner plates. They looked over a shipping crate that was addressed to Prudence. It was filled with little atomizers of perfume. They were labeled:

  YOUNG LADIES! YOUNG LADIES!

  You’re no smelly APE if you use

  Dr. Felix Weisenheimer’s

  MIRACULOUS PATENTED

  DE-SCENTIFYING

  PERFUME

  “Guaranteed to Smell Like Nothing!”

  They tried some on the back of Gregory’s hand.

  “Wow,” Gregory said sarcastically, sniffing. “It really works. I don’t smell like anything.” He put it back.

  “Says you,” said Brian.

  “Funny one,” said Gregory.

  They uncovered an aging nautical atlas, a 1928 prayer book, and a mattress that crawled gray with sow-beetles. There were a few dining room chairs with limbs ampu-tated, an epaulet box filled with sandy seashells, and a jade mah-jongg set.

  Gregory called, “Brian…here. I think we’ve hit pay dirt.”

  Brian stepped over some snowshoes and came to his side. “What is it?”

  “Some kind of a book of war photographs.”

  “What?”

  “Here—forget the bird for a second. Look.” He had one page open. “Look. Look at this.”

  Brian looked. It was an old book, written in a language that resembled scratches on the page. The photographic plates were black and white.

  The picture Gregory pointed to was of the mountain behind the house. The sides were covered with metal.

  “Bingo, huh?” said Gregory.

  “Yeah,” agreed Brian. “Bingo.”

  Gregory flipped through the other pages. There were pictures of men running through smoke and steam. There were airships with wings.

  “Let’s go upstairs and look through this thing,” said Gregory.

  “Sure.”

  “I think we may have some answers.”

  They took one last look at the grouse. Then they headed for the steps. By the foot of the stairs there was a crate of mildew-splotched Hummel figurines.

  “Yecch,” said Gregory. Brian stooped to pick one up.

  Little German children, wearing lederhosen, kissed while carpets of fungus crawled and devoured them.

  They rushed up the stairs to the kitchen with the book under Gregory’s arm.

  They threw open the door and turned the corner, to find Uncle Max glowering at them, his arms crossed. “Down in the basement?” he barked.

  Gregory nodded. He couldn’t speak.

  “Ah. And did I give you permission?”

  “Well, no, but we just thought, as guests—”

  “Whose house is this, boy?”

  Prudence interrupted. “With respect, Mr. Grendle, I can’t see any harm in them looking around to find interesting gewgaws, why—”

  “I did not give them permission. What if they had found some…some letters of a personal nature…or some photographs…or something dangerous…the kind of thing that punches holes in people…one of those things that takes off your skin…with the…the revolving…what…you see, anything!” He turned to Gregory. “You might have been in great danger, boy! Didn’t think I would need to tell you—there’s a Basement Lurker down there! A Basement Lurker! If those lamps had gone out, that creature would have snatched you faster than you can peel persimmons. Huge teeth. Gaping mouth! A nightmare of rapacity!”

  “Uncle Max—”

  “You were impertinent and rude to invade others’ privacy, and you put yourself at great risk. I will not stand for such pertinacity in a relative, even an adopted one.” Uncle Max frowned impressively and pointed toward Brian. “It is doubtless—yes, doubtless!—the influence of this young man here.”

  “Sir,” Gregory protested, “Brian is the nicest—”

  “…This clever little whey-faced baggage! Whose pallor and moody silences suggest nothing so much as the physiognomy and conduct of a third-generation safe-cracker. ”

  “Uncle Max,” said Prudence, stepping to his side.

  Max pointed to Gregory’s hand. “What have you got there?”

  Gregory held the book up limply. “A book,” he said. “It’s just a book of old war photographs.”

  “You are going to flip through it?”

  “We don’t know the language it’s in,” said Gregory.

  “How will you protect it,” Uncle Max asked, whisking his fingertips together, “from the oil on the pads of your fingers? How will you stop the oil from your fingertips from staining the pages with whorls?”

  “The book was under a fish tank filled with dirt,” said Gregory.

  Uncle Max reached into his pocket and drew out some white gloves. “Use these,” he said. “That book may be valuable.”

  “There were centipedes living on it.”

  The boys took the gloves and book and headed upstairs to their rooms.

  “Sorry about that,” said Gregory to Brian.

  Brian shrugged uncomfortably. “What is it about me?” he asked.

  “Brian,” said Gregory, “don’t listen. He’s a guy in hundred-year-old pants who uses words no one can understand. ”

  Brian just nodded.

  “Let’s look at the book,” said Gregory, slapping his friend on the arm. They sat by the grate, and Gregory put on the gloves. He laid the book on his crossed legs and opened it.

  Together, they began to follow the sequence of pictures.

  It was a war that had been fought in the area. It was unclear when. Noblemen in wigs and long, buttoned coats made their speeches by yelling through megaphones. Ladies in long robes sat playing the harp in gardens while slugs glistened blackly all around them. Women and children in a cobbled stone square were building a flying machine out of flattened tin cans. The little girls had ribbons in their hair. The machine’s wings were jagged and bat-like.

  The boys found a photo of one of the soldiers. “Looks like World War One to me,” said Gregory. “From the helmet. Those shallow helmets.”

  Brian’s brow furrowed. “But look.”

  The soldier’s ears were long and tapered.

  “Hey, watch it with the pointing,” said Gregory. “The pads. The whorls. Okay?”

  “His ears,” said Brian. “They’re like an elf’s.”

  Gregory squinted. “Huh,” he said. “You’re right. An elf’s.” He flipped another page, bewildered.

  The mountains in the pictures were definitely the ones just outside the window. The boys looked up from the book to see them outlined in black against the storm. Outside, the evening was falling.

  In the photos, workmen in overalls hung by ropes near long processions of rivets. On the peak of the tallest metal-plated mountain, there were battlements with scopes and guns.

  In another shot, a huge sphere, perhaps twenty-five feet across, had smashed into the
mountainside. It was embedded in the rock. Soldiers, tiny near its bulk, were smoking cigarettes under its shadow.

  In one photo, priests knelt. In another, magicians were panicking. Photos from the top of the mountain showed distant armies spread throughout the trees, guns trained on the battlements. Smoke rose from the woods. The boys turned the page.

  “And there we have the enemy,” said Gregory.

  It was a line of prisoners. Like the soldiers around them, they had long, pointed ears. But unlike their captors, their eyes were sunken and ringed with black.

  “So what happened?” asked Brian. “Who won?”

  Gregory turned more pages. No answers. Only more photos. Elfin men speaking into wall-mounted horns. Citizens of a hidden kingdom looking tired, worn, weeping. There were stalactites high, high above their heads, and arched stone ceilings. They appeared to live under the mountain.

  “Maybe the battle hasn’t been decided yet,” whispered Brian.

  “Huh?” Gregory said.

  “Maybe that’s why we’re playing the game.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe we represent one side.”

  They looked up at the game board. The hourglass was still turned upside down. Grains of sand fell slowly upward.

  “How long has it been since you flipped over the hourglass the first time?”

  “About a day and a half,” answered Gregory gravely.

  “How much of the sand do you think has dropped?”

  Gregory eyed the timer. “About a fourth. Maybe a little less than a fourth.”

  Brian nodded. “So we have about five days left.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until the game’s over.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “I don’t think I want to be around, if we haven’t won by then.”

  “Or if the other team—whoever they are—wins first.” Gregory shut the book and lay back on the rug. He sighed. “There’s no logical explanation anymore, is there?”

  Brian shook his head. “We’re in a world with magic.”

  “I didn’t believe you about the troll.”

  Brian looked at him. “You didn’t?”

  “I thought there would be some explanation. Strings. Or mirrors. Latex.”

  “I told you, I saw him.”

  “What does it mean,” Gregory wondered, “to be in a world with magic?”

  Brian didn’t say anything. He pressed his hands between his knees. “We don’t know the rules anymore,” he said. “We don’t know what to expect.”

  Gregory said, “I feel like everything’s teasing us. Everything’s talking, and we can’t hear it.”

  “They know something,” murmured Brian. “It all makes sense to someone.”

  “We have a choice tomorrow,” said Gregory. “Solve the troll’s riddle or face the Winnower in the Chasm.”

  They went to bed early that night. Downstairs, Prudence sewed for a while while Uncle Max read a paper in the language that looked like ancient Norse. In the kitchen, Burk and Daffodil polished silver. The radio played swing tunes and dispatches from a war long over.

  Later, when everyone else had gone to bed, Burk made his rounds, extinguishing the gaslights. The embers clicked and sighed in the fireplace.

  Soon the house was silent, save for the falling rain and the measured breathing of those who slumbered there.

  In the early hours of the morning, the rain grew heavier. Dark, smoky clouds drifted in over the trees, giving the night sky an unearthly glow, like black light or something seen in delirium. Water flew down in torrents from the sky, scrambling down the tiles of the roof to leap headlong into brass gutters and shoot down into puddles on the ground below.

  Perhaps it was the first roar of thunder that awakened Gregory. He lay in his bed, rigid with fear from a half-forgotten nightmare. A boat had been leaving…him lying on deck, stained with the rust…watching his belly pucker, and slowly form a face…and try to whisper to him…that…

  The rain rattled down his darkened window. Wind shook the wooden frame. Gregory tried to forget what he had dreamed. He willed himself to go back to sleep, but felt only the tightness of the gut that comes from wanting too badly to fall asleep again.

  He heard a distant dripping louder than the rattle of the rain. He heard the smacking of boards against one another, as if a shutter were flapping.

  A gaunt and pallid hand flung itself up onto the window, groping for a hold.

  Gregory didn’t move.

  The hand grasped the molding, and a shadowy form shot up out of the gloom, climbing the wall.

  Gregory tried to breathe.

  The figure climbed. A black overcoat twisted and flapped in the wind and rain. The battered top hat was crumpled on the brow. Gregory gasped. At that instant, the lightning struck again, and the brilliant illumination highlighted the hooded eyes, the stubbly chin that ran with rainwater and, finally, a serene and chilly smile. Jack Stimple peered in through the window and saw Gregory.

  He raised a fist to smash the pane of glass. Gregory screamed, his voice hoarse with the intensity. Jack looked skyward, found another handhold, and pulled himself up. His legs and scuffed shoes hung for an instant in midair, then were pulled out of sight.

  Brian, Prudence, and Burk all burst into the room at the same time.

  “Dear me—Gregory—whatever’s the matter?” Prudence asked over the crash of the rain.

  “Jack Stimple…he’s climbing the house…”

  “Who?” said Prudence.

  “Why?” demanded Brian.

  “I just saw him! Jack is here!”

  “Did you have a bad dream?” asked Prudence, smoothing the arm of his pajamas. “Sometimes I have one about a rhino.”

  “It’s a man!” yelled Gregory. “Climbing the walls!”

  “Burk,” said Prudence, “could you look upstairs?”

  Burk nodded and darted out of the room.

  “Did you see where he was headed?” asked Prudence.

  “The roof,” said Gregory, pointing. “Up there!”

  Brian mused, “What could be…”

  “What did the man look like?” asked Prudence. “This is a man you know?”

  Suddenly, Brian’s eyes were wide. He hurled himself past them, his nightgown flapping after him. “Come on!” he shouted.

  “What is it, Brian?” asked Gregory.

  “Come on!” Brian urged. “I know what he’s after!”

  He ran out of the nursery. Burk was already thudding up the steps from below, pistol in hand.

  Brian tumbled up the stairs, gasping and desperate. Burk trotted after him. Brian stumbled through the dark game room to the secret door and swung it open. “In here!” Brian ordered.

  Burk rushed into the secret chamber and looked around quickly, assessing the situation. Then he yanked up the window sash and leaped out into the raging night. The wind tore at his coat, making the tails snap and crack. He began to scramble up one of the roofs. Brian pulled himself through the window. His nightshirt was soaked with the torrents that poured down around him. He couldn’t see, save for the glistening highlights on the slick slate shingles. A flash of lightning tore across the angry clouds, and Brian looked up at the peak of the highest tower.

  There, groaning in the violent gusts of wind, was the weathercock.

  With determination, Brian began to pull himself up the conical roof.

  Jack Stimple burst over the edge of the roof. He reached up to claw at Brian’s trailing nightshirt.

  Brian swung his legs up, staring down warily at the shrouded figure in the crevasse. The hand slammed down where Brian’s feet had been. Brian crawled a few more inches upward. He fumbled briefly for the peak of the tower, and finally managed to clutch the weathervane. He grasped and pulled, trembling. His face was level with the rusted ornament.

  A clammy hand seized his foot and pulled.

  Brian gritted his teeth and pounded on the hand with his free fist. The weathervane popp
ed free of its setting and, with a jolt, Brian began to slide down the conical roof. He saw suddenly that he was veering sideways, about to plunge entirely off the edge.

  He slammed the weathervane down on Jack Stimple’s hand. Screeching, the man released the boy, rolling down the tiles into the valley between the roofs. Burk appeared over the flashing of the next roof and took aim. The thief heaved himself up and grasped the peak opposite to Burk. A shot rang out, and a tile sluggishly skittered over into the crevasse. Jack pulled himself over a dormer as another bullet smacked the roof.

  For a brief second, Stimple stood outlined on the ridge of the roof, his hands raised almost in supplication to the violent storm that slashed out around them. Burk aimed once again, squinting along the barrel of the revolver. He pulled the trigger.

  There was an explosion, and Jack flew off the roof, twisting and tumbling dumbly in midair.

  Then, all that remained was the rushing of the wind and the pattering of the rain.

  Brian slid down into the valley between roofs. He rested there for a brief second, lightly grasping the weathervane, then rose.

  Burk was standing nearby. “Is the young master all well?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “What’s happening?” Prudence shouted out the window.

  Brian answered, “Burk shot Jack Stimple. He’s down on the side of the house with the terrarium.”

  Prudence stepped away from the window, and the people who were gathered in the billiard room rushed out into the hall and down the steps.

  “Thank you again, Burk,” said Brian.

  Burk said nothing, but stepped back through the window into the secret room.

  The woods were still draped in darkness the next morning, and the trees were coated with pulpy slime. Soaking leaves dropped off their branches with an audible plop. Everything was dark gray, brown, or black. The autumn colors were all masked by the drizzling gloom that had spread itself over the mountains.

  The two boys slogged through the dripping woods, both with tweed capes over their knickerbockers. Brian’s glasses were spotted with water, and his hair was wet. In his arms, he clutched a large and rusty weathervane. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how Jack could have lived after being shot and falling three stories.” Gregory shrugged his shoulders. Brian continued, “Maybe he’s a wizard. Or maybe that’s something his race can just do.”