Dandelion Fire (21 page)

“Richard!” He got louder. “Richard! Richard!” It was a little embarrassing. Everyone in the post office had to be able to hear him.

Finally, Henry stood up and stepped back. He couldn't keep yelling indefinitely. And the cupboard was already open. But why would it be open? How could it be open? Henrietta was the only one who would have done that. And that meant that she had to be there. Ignoring him. She was probably even watching him. He knew that she could see through. They had watched the postman together.

He swallowed hard. His ears were buzzing. If she was just sitting there laughing at him, he was going to be very angry.

He crouched back down.

“Henrietta!” he yelled, and felt his throat burn with the volume. “You have to be there. Who else opened this? Anastasia? Say something if you're there. Right now! Reach through. Show me your hand. Do something!”

He stopped and rested his forehead against the top
edge of the box. He could feel something tingling against his skin. And in his fingertips. Leaning back, he looked at his hands.

A whispering motion drifted around their edges. He straightened up and moved away.

He stared at the wall and felt his eyes shifting, growing wet. He was seeing everything. Twice.

The wood in each of the boxes had its own crawling signature, but it wasn't hard to pick out his. In all the crawling, his was a gap in the magic, a black swirling funnel. The slow motion from the other boxes moved around it and disappeared inside. It was like looking at a hurricane on a weather map. If a hurricane could be black, and if a weather map could look real.

Henry's head hurt, but he didn't look away. He looked deeper. He saw more. Beyond the movement in front of him, he could see the wall in his bedroom. Not his wall. The trailing threads and dry, dusty, tired words that made up his wall. His teeth started hurting. Badly. Like something was sliding his gums back and icing the nerves. Hot tears were running down his cheeks. He could taste their salt as they crept in the corners of his mouth, and his nose was running.

Still, he didn't look away. He could do this. Quickly, Henry slid off his backpack. After a moment, he held his breath and tossed it at the hole. It vanished.

Henry stepped forward, wobbling in his boots. Ignoring the backs of all the boxes, he reached into the tiny hole with both hands.

* * *

The pressure in his ears was unbearable. He yelled as loud and as long as he could. But he heard nothing. Something burning and sticky bubbled in the corners of his eyes, and his skull throbbed. The pain moved on, bending his clavicles and bowing his ribs.

His face pressed into something wet, and his body folded up behind him. He was still yelling, but now he could hear. He rolled onto his back in the darkness and felt himself falling.

Henry threw up his arms, grabbing for anything to catch himself. Something hard bit into his shin, and he heard a slam. His right hand gripped a door, and something cracked. His left gripped another, closed on knobs, and slipped off. He heard a door slap shut, and he was falling again. But only a matter of inches.

With a bang, he was sitting on the damp floor of his little attic room, and his back was against the foot of his bed. He didn't know why his mattress was wet. A single beam of light shone out of the post-office box above him.

“Henrietta,” he said. “Are you in here? Richard?”

The room was busy with small sounds and smells. Through it all, he could tell that Badon Hill was open. Blinking, his eyelids were sticking. He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled to where he knew his lamp should be. It was lying on the floor, broken.

In the very low light, Henry could see his backpack lumped against his doors. He picked it up, unzipped it,
and felt around inside. Grandfather's journals were intact, still rubber-banded together. And beside them, he felt the flashlight.

Henry pulled the flashlight out, flicked it on, and ran the spot across his cupboard wall. They were all open. Well, most of them. Endor was closed down by the floor, and so was one cupboard on the left side. He'd kicked and banged a few shut right around the post-office box, and the door to Badon Hill dangled on a single hinge. He'd almost pulled it entirely off.

The compass lock door was closed.

Henry stood up and pulled his bedroom doors open. Stepping out into the attic, he flicked light down onto Richard's spot. The sleeping bag was gone.

The attic smelled a little funny, and the window at the end was broken. Outside, the sky was preparing for dawn. Or the sun had just set and it was dusk. He couldn't tell which just by looking out the attic window.

“Hello?” Henry yelled down the stairs. “Uncle Frank? Aunt Dotty?”

Henry stood at the top and shifted his feet nervously. Something was very wrong. Richard's bed was gone, the window was smashed, and most of the cupboards were open. Darius had pulled him through the cupboards, but he had assumed that nothing else had happened. Now he wished he hadn't yelled.

He could feel his blood roaring through his veins, and his pulse twitched in his forehead. Listening, he could hear nothing human. A floorboard popped on the
first story. Wind rustled in an open window somewhere. And why was the floor wet?

There was no good excuse for staying in the attic. He had to go down. Henry turned off the flashlight. Then he sat down, pulled off his awkward boots, bit his lip, and began feeling his way down the stairs barefoot.

Henry had heard each stair creak many times, and he'd snuck down them often enough. But now, the sigh of nails moving in their cramped homes jumped out at him, pulsing surprise and adrenaline along with his blood. He didn't know this house. Not anymore.

He reached the second-story landing. There was only one window, and it was open. Its curtain was drifting in place. There was a little light, enough for him to see that the carpet was causing the dank smell. Enough to see that Grandfather's room was open. Henry stepped off the stairs and winced as moisture squirted between his toes. He hurried across the landing and knuckle-tapped on his aunt and uncle's door. It wasn't latched. He pushed it open and looked inside. They weren't there, and the bed had been stripped of blankets.

Henry moved back to his cousins' door and pushed it open. The room was empty, and the blankets were gone.

He didn't want to, but Henry took a deep breath and tiptoed across the wet floor and into Grandfather's room.

The cupboard was open, and the bed was stripped. But Henry was trying to process something else.
Something much stranger. Both of Grandfather's windows were smashed, and the wood around them had been splintered. The curtains had fallen or been pulled down. They lay on the floor. A breeze was crawling in, and it smelled much better than the house. Behind the breeze, there was a naked blue sky, dark, but brightening. Beneath the sky, there was no Henry, Kansas.

Henry walked to the window slowly, forgetting everything else. A sea of grass rippled to the horizon. A police car was parked in the front yard, and someone had built a fire near it. A charred chair leg was still sticking out of the black spot in the short grass.

Henry closed his eyes and opened them again. Nothing had changed. Staring, wondering, entirely confused, he forgot to breathe. When his body made him, he choked and coughed. His knees wobbled, and he sat down on Grandfather's bed.

This was not how things were supposed to work. He should be home now, telling Anastasia to be quiet so he could finish his story, making Penelope laugh and impressing Henrietta with his escape and fall. Aunt Dotty should be hugging him, and Uncle Frank should be squeezing his shoulder and saying something that almost made sense. He should be calling Zeke about playing baseball today, maybe even trying to teach Richard.

But they were all someplace else. He looked at the cupboard. Sliding off the bed, he squatted on the floor and turned on his flashlight. The cupboard back was solid. The compass combination didn't lead anywhere.
He stood up. They might not be gone. They might all be stuck here.

They might all be dead here.

Henry pushed away his fear. He refused to think about it. He would go downstairs first, and then outside. If they were here, alive or dead, he would find them. If they weren't, well, if they weren't, he didn't know what he would do.

He stood up and hurried out of the room. He wasn't going to sneak downstairs. He was going to yell. He was going to barge, quieting his nerves as much as he could with false confidence.

It wasn't easy. He thumped down the stairs and yelled at the bottom.

“Anyone here? Uncle Frank, are you okay?”

The front door was open, but the screen was shut. It had a hole instead of a handle. Henry kicked it wide and leaned onto the front porch.

“Hello?”

He let the screen slam in front of him, turned, and walked through the living room. Something soft and smooth flattened beneath his toes, crushed into the swamped carpet. Henry stopped and looked down, lifting his foot. It was a mushroom. The living room floor had sprouted a ring of small mushrooms. In the center of the ring, a dense knot of them bulged up out of the carpet. Henry stared, and staring did nothing to help explain it. But there were weirder things going on than mushrooms in the living room.

Picking his way around the floor fungi, he walked into the dining room. Four cans of tuna were stacked on the table beside a can opener.

He threw open the door to the television room, glanced inside, then stepped back out and moved on to the kitchen.

“Aunt Dotty?”

He hurried on to the mudroom and jerked open the back door.

Sunlight blazed, and Henry stepped backward, kicked his toe with his heel, and sat down with a crash.

He was looking at early-morning Kansas. The thick grass that needed mowing ran down to where the barn hulked in all of its red, flaking glory. Beyond it were the fields of ripening grain. Henry picked himself up off the floor and stepped out onto the concrete block step and then into the yard.

“Uncle Frank?” he yelled. “Aunt Dotty?”

He heard nothing but the yammering of birds, and he turned around.

He almost fell over again. There was no house. He was standing at the edge of a large hole with a pool at the bottom. Yellow police tape had been circled around it, but right in front of him, hanging in the air, there was an open doorway back into the mudroom.

He did not want that door to shut.

hope you intend to issue kidnapping warrants,” the woman said.

“Couldn't say,” the cop said, shifting in the driver's seat. “Don't know why we would, though.”

The woman turned and glared at him. He just watched the road. He could see the Willises' barn now, and the yellow tape around the hole.

“They have taken illegal possession of someone's child.” The woman shook her head. “Law enforcement.” She said it like an insult.

The cop didn't want to get into an argument with her. The woman was a lawyer, and arguing is what she did. But he was not at all sure how someone could be charged with kidnapping when their entire house disappeared, along with a sergeant and his prowl car. As far as he was concerned, aliens were the likeliest explanation. And he didn't even believe in aliens.

“That's it right there,” he said, and he slowed the car to a stop on the shoulder. “That's where the house has always been. At least since I was born.”

“Who is that boy?” the woman asked.

The cop leaned forward and squinted. She was right. There was a boy walking around, looking in the hole.

The woman pulled out a photo, looked at it, and looked back up. “That's Henry York.”

She opened her door and got out.

“Henry!” she yelled. “Are you all right? I'm here to take you back to Boston to live with your mother.”

The boy straightened up.

“Your father granted custody, so things went much faster than we expected. Come get in the car.”

She began picking her way carefully through the yard. The boy turned and ran around to the back of the hole. He looked at her and then at the cop car, and he jumped. When he jumped, he vanished.

“Wha—” the cop said.